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CONTEMPORARY MEN 
OF LETTERS SERIES 

EDITED BY 
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY 



WALTER PATER 






V 



w 






WALTER PATER 

BY FERRIS GREENSLET 



Contemporary 



Men of Letters 




NEW YORK 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS # CO. 

MCMIII 



THE LIBRARY OF 
COMCafcESS, 


T *vo Copies Received 


OCT 10 


1903 


CopyiifeM 

CLASS Ol 


entry 
XXc No 1 


' copy a. 1 



Tfiri3L 



«7. 



;9d3 



Copyright, 1903, by 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 



' < c • 

I- * * • • • 



.Entjlisljed, October, 1903, N 



V' 



V 



PREFATORY NOTE 



PREFATORY NOTE 

This brief study of the life and work 
of Walter Pater does not pretend to be 
the "verdict of posterity," for it has to 
do with an author whose personal influ- 
ence is still active in contemporary litera- 
ture. Yet perhaps in dealing with such 
a person as Pater, who is notable chiefly 
for literary and scholarly labors, spatial 
distance may afford something of the per- 
spective usually given only by remoteness 
in time. In any case Pater is the last 
man in the world to be made the subject 
of Boswellian biography. I have tried 
here to make him, so far as possible, his 
own interpreter; and I have hoped by 

I™] 



PREFATORY NOTE 
quotation, frequent and unashamed, to 
convey some intimation of his quality. 

As Pater's career was so essentially a 
matter of "mere literature," I have been 
at some pains to make the Chronology 
which is appended a complete and accu- 
rate bibliography of his writings. In 
preparing this I have been aided by Mr. 
Shadwell's list prefixed to the "Miscel- 
laneous Studies" and by the lists of 
Pater's review articles contained in the 
AthenceuTns review of the first English 
edition of the "Essays from the Guar- 
dian." 

F. G. 



f viii ] 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. A Child in the House 3 

II. Oxford 17 

III, Criticism of Art and Letters . . 38 

IV. Philosophic Fiction and the Art of 

Style ......... 73 

V. "The New Cyrenaicism " . . . .102 

VI. Last Years 139 

Chronology 153 



WALTER PATER 



' When I read the booh, the biography famous, 
And is this, then, (said I) what the author calls 

a man's life? 
And so will someone when I am dead and gone 

write my life? 
(As if any man really knew aught of my life; 
Why, even I myself, I often think, know little or 

nothing of my real life; 
Only a few hints — a few diffused, faint clues and 

indirections 
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)" 

Whitman. 



I 

A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 

The writer of biography who can mus- 
ter the strength of mind sometimes to 
leave his shop, and in the open to medi- 
tate upon his trade, must often be abashed 
at its facile presumptions. If he strive 
to recall the flow of his own life, he will 
find that it has been full of mystery to 
himself — and to others, to his friends 
even, or to his very housemates, much 
more mysterious. How hardly, then, 
shall he explain the life of one whom he 
has never seen, who lived perhaps in a 
far land, in other times, amid an alien 
[3] 



WALTER PATER 
people. Yet so assured are men of the 
resurrective power of literary scholarship 
that they have not hesitated to attempt 
the recall of such remote and misty per- 
sons as Abelard or Zoroaster. But, after 
he has once felt this sense of futility, the 
biographer will always wish to make some 
preliminary reservation. He will under- 
take to deal fairly with his reader, to be 
diligent in gathering knowledge of his 
subject, to order it carefully, to ponder it 
strictly and sympathetically; but he will 
not undertake to portray the elusive per- 
sonality in all its fulness. Such reserva- 
tion as this is especially needful in the 
case of a man like Walter Pater. His 
life was self-contained, subjective, sta- 
tionary; it was a life of academic amen- 
[4] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
ity, singularly devoid of the "rubs, doub- 
lings, and wrenches" which afford the 
biographer his best, most picturesque op- 
portunity. The annals of it are short, 
and, if confined to external happenings, 
simple. But the interpretation of them 
is a more difficult affair. If we can 
capture some clews and hints of charac- 
ter, however diffused and indirect, if we 
can partially apprehend a fugitive and 
recondite but strangely effective literary 
personality, we shall be fortunate. 

It is, perhaps, significant that Walter 
Pater, one of the most minutely labori- 
ous of English writers, should have been 
of Dutch extraction; for in all Low 
Country workmanship he was to recog- 
nise a "minute and scrupulous air of 
[5] 



WALTER PATER 
care-taking and neatness." In the eigh- 
teenth century the Paters had migrated 
from Holland to England, intermarried 
with their English compeers, and become 
known as a highly respectable family of 
the middle class. Early in the last cen- 
tury Richard Glode Pater, the father of 
our author, was born, by the chances of 
travel, in New York. Taken back to 
England while still a young boy, he was 
in due time married to Maria Hill, a 
north country girl, and settled in life as 
a physician. In his career one thing is 
especially to our purpose. For genera- 
tions before him the Pater family had 
adhered piously to an extraordinary cus- 
tom. There would seem to have been 
some ancient division of religious senti- 
[6] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
ment between the Paters and their Eng- 
lish wives. In consequence of this the 
male children of the family were inva- 
riably reared as good Catholics, while 
the daughters, quite as invariably, were 
brought up in the Anglican communion. 
Early in his life Dr. Richard Glode 
Pater left the Church of Rome to take 
up no other connection. Thus his sons, 
with the ancient tradition of the Church 
of Rome in their mental heritage, were 
the first of the family to be educated out 
of Catholicism. 

Walter Horatio Pater, the second of 
four children, was born at Shadwell in 
the East of London, on the fourth of 
August, 1839. Not long after this event 
Dr. Pater moved with his household to 
[7] 



WALTER PATER 
Enfield, in Middlesex, some four leagues 
from London, and it was there that 
Walter Pater passed the better part of 
his youth. Of his earliest childhood 
there are few facts of sufficient im- 
portance to be reported. It will not 
do, however, to overlook a strange and 
pretty game described by Mr. Edmund 
Gosse as much beloved by the Pater chil- 
dren. This would seem to have been a 
kind of make-believe mass or other ritu- 
alistic ceremonial, in which the young 
Walter, arrayed in an improvised dal- 
matic, with sedate dignity and hieratic 
solemnity of demeanour, would always be 
bishop. 

But although the chronicle of events 
in Mr. Pater's life would have perforce 
[8] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
to leap from his birth to his fourteenth 
year, it is, perhaps, not too fanciful to 
find in that imaginative study of the 
psychology of youth, "The Child in the 
House," some hints of certain very real 
influences in his own childhood. To be- 
gin with the more tangible things: that 
"white Angora with a dark tail like an 
ermine's, and a face like a flower, who 
fell into a lingering sickness and became 
quite delicately human in its valetudina- 
rianism, and came to have a hundred 
different expressions of voice," must 
surely have arched her dainty way in 
visible, purring, feline presence through 
the old house at Enfield. And it is 
hard to believe that the peculiarly in- 
timate realisation of a kind of mystic 
[9] 



WALTER PATER 
personality in the house itself, so vital 
a charm in this study and so often re- 
current in his other work, had no pro- 
totype in the thoughts of young Pater. 
To any sensitive child, of course, the 
home, with its multitudinous objects and 
manifold associations, will seem a part of 
himself, a second and more comprehen- 
sive "me." So far "The Child in the 
House" is but a study in the paganism 
of young minds; yet here and there are 
suggestions of that almost hyperaesthetic 
sensitiveness that we associate with Pater, 
which seem to give to it a clear personal 
reference. No one is likely to doubt that 
in such passages as this there is a core of 
reminiscence : 

"From this point he could trace two 
[10] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
predominant processes of mental change 
in him — the growth of an almost diseased 
sensibility to the spectacle of suffering, 
and, parallel with this, the rapid growth 
of a certain capacity of fascination by 
bright colour and choice form — the sweet 
curvings, for instance, of the lips of those 
who seemed to him comely persons, modu- 
lated in such delicate unison to what they 
said or sang — marking early the activity 
in him of a more than customary sensu- 
ousness, 'the lust of the eye,' as the 
Preacher says, which might lead him, one 
day, how far! Could he have foreseen 
the weariness of the way! In music 
sometimes the two sorts of impressions 
came together, and he would weep, to the 
surprise of older people." 
[11] 



WALTER PATER 

We know, too, that there came one 
time a "cry on the stair," telling of a 
death in the house. We may well believe 
that he was never precisely a vociferous 
boy, and remembering how much of his 
mature writing was to partake of the 
sombreness of meditatio mortis, we may 
see something other than fiction in what 
he tells us of Florian Deleal's sympa- 
thetic but quite morbid imaginings: 

"He would think of Julian, fallen into 
incurable sickness, as spoiled in the sweet 
blossom of his skin like pale amber and 
his honey-like hair; of Cecil, early dead, 
as cut off from the lilies, from golden 
summer days, from women's voices; and 
what comforted him a little was the 
thought of the turning of the child's 
[12] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
flesh to violets in the turf above him. 
And thinking of the very poor, it was 
not the things that most men care most 
for that he yearned to give them; but 
fairer roses, perhaps, and power to taste 
quite as they will, at their ease and not 
task-burdened, a certain desirable clear 
light in the new morning, through which 
sometimes he had noticed them, quite un- 
conscious of it, on the way to their early 
toil." 

Finally, considering the location of 
Enfield, it is reasonable to suppose that 
Walter Pater, as well as Florian Deleal, 
was wrought upon by the mysterious ur- 
banity of the adjacent city; and remem- 
bering that pontifical play one must be 
confident that he, too, "began to love, for 
[13] 



WALTER PATER 
their own sakes, church lights, holy days, 
all that belonged to the comely order of 
the sanctuary, the secrets of its white 
linen, and holy vessels, and fonts of pure 
water;" and that for him, too, "its hie- 
ratic purity and simplicity became the 
type of something he desired always to 
have about him in actual life." 

When he was fourteen Pater was sent 
away from his home to King's School at 
Canterbury. He appears there as a some- 
what slow and serious boy, not caring 
for boisterous sports, sometimes thought 
an idler, or perhaps a dreamer. It is 
the consensus of opinion among Pater's 
friends that the background and setting 
for the account of Emerald Uthwart's 
schooldays is this Canterbury Academe. 
[14] 



A CHILD IN THE HOUSE 
Here, in one of the places in which Eng- 
land has "preferred to locate the some- 
what pensive education of its more fa- 
voured youth," he studied his classics. As 
he acquired pagan Latin and Greek in the 
very shadow of medievalism, there may 
have come to him some of those "delight- 
ful physiognomic results" which he after- 
ward noted in many a boyish face. At 
any rate it must have been at this time 
that he first became a diligent reader of 
books. There are, he tells us, "in every 
generation of schoolboys ... a few 
who find out, almost for themselves, the 
beauty and power of good literature, even 
in the literature they must read perforce ; 
and this, in turn, is but the handsel of a 
beauty and power still active in the actual 
[15] 



WALTER PATER 
world, should they have the good fortune, 
or rather acquire the skill, to deal with it 
properly. It has something of the stir 
and unction — this intellectual awaking 
with a leap — of the coming of love." 
With Pater as with Emerald Uthwart, 
this quickening seems to have taken place 
when he was in his seventeenth year. 

Toward the end of his schooldays he 
came much under the influence of the 
polished scholarship, graceful lyric gift, 
and gentle piety of Keble. For a time 
hence, it is said, he thought of ultimately 
taking orders. But this proved to be 
only a fervour of adolescence, and when, 
at the age of nineteen, he went up to 
Oxford, the bent of his future career was 
still undetermined. 

[16] 



II 

OXFORD 
In June, 1858, Pater matriculated at 
Oxford as a commoner of Queen's Col- 
lege, with an exhibition from Canterbury. 
Henceforth his life ran smoothly in the 
traditional academic channel with which 
English literary biography has f amiliarly 
acquainted us. Oxford, ''that sweet city 
with her dreaming spires," was to be his 
home for nearly all of his life. It is, 
perhaps, just to imagine that in his very 
style we may discover something of the 
spirit of her mood as Matthew Arnold 
found another trace of it in Newman's. 

It has always been the right and natu- 
ral thing for the undergraduate of sen- 
sibility to come under the spell of some 
[17] 



WALTER PATER 
one or two makers of the "literature of 
power." Walter Pater, being before all 
else an undergraduate of sensibility, was 
not slow so to yield himself. By 1859 
he had become devoted to Ruskin and to 
Goethe. Their influence he was, perhaps, 
to transcend, certainly to fuse with many 
others, but never wholly to belie or dis- 
own. 

Such reading as this, reinforced by his 
philosophical studies, led him to the way 
beaten by the feet of many generations 
of reflective youth. Before the end of 
his undergraduate days he seems, again 
like his own Florian Deleal, to have been 
much occupied with "the estimate of the 
proportion of the sensuous and ideal ele- 
ments in human knowledge, the relative 
[18] 



OXFORD 

parts they bear in it; and, in his intellec- 
tual scheme, was led to assign very little 
to the abstract thought, and much to its 
sensible vehicle or occasion." Not long 
after this, his philosophical and sceptical 
tendency finally prevailed over his half- 
formed intention of becoming a Unita- 
rian clergyman — a notion that had oc- 
curred to him after he had abandoned the 
intention of entering the Establishment. 
Indeed, he had already begun, consciously 
and carefully, to acquire technique in the 
art which was to be his. Though none 
of his undergraduate productions has 
been preserved, we hear of copious verse 
translation from Goethe, from Alfred de 
Musset, and from that fragrant jardi- 
niere for the perfuming of a young gen- 
[19] 



WALTER PATER 
tleman's style, the " Greek Anthology." 
A little later there was a time when for 
months he applied himself daily to the 
painstaking translation of a page from 
the prose of Sainte-Beuve, or Flaubert, 
eminent humanists, patient artists with 
the file, and favoured lovers of the proper 
word. The effect of such labour as this 
in forming his finished style is incal- 
culable. 

In 1862 Pater graduated B.A. with a 
second class in classics. As he had been 
coached by Jowett himself, and hoped for 
a first, he seems always to have regarded 
his degree as something of a disappoint- 
ment. For two years he was a private 
tutor; in 1864 he became Fellow of 
Brasenose, and then, in 1865, he proceed- 
[20] 



OXFORD 

ed M.A. As is the way with men of his 
character, these first years after gradua- 
tion were momentous in fixing his tem- 
perament and in determining the direc- 
tion of his life. It was at this time that 
he became a member of an essay club 
suggestively known as the "Old Mor- 
tality," and the intimate friend of such 
men as T. H. Green, Professor Net- 
tleship, Principal Caird, and Mr. Swin- 
burne. His early study of character, 
"Diaphaneite," published posthumously, 
but written in 1864, was read to this 
circle of friends. It is a document of 
very curious interest to the student of 
Pater's mind. It shows the sensuous, 
subtilely allusive, somewhat languorous 
flow of his style still undeveloped. The 
[21] 



WALTER PATER 
sentences are shorter, more uniformly pe- 
riodic; and the whole composition moves 
with unwonted resiliency and speed. But 
in the intimacy of the study, and in the 
comely, Hellenic type of character held 
up to our admiration, there is a clear fore- 
shadowing of Pater's later manner and 
theme. It is, moreover, pervaded by the 
"wistfulness of mind, the feeling that 
there is so much to know," which marks 
the true humanistic temperament. A 
year later, in company with Mr. Charles 
L. Shadwell, the life-long friend who was 
to be his literary executor, Pater visited 
Italy for the first time. Here he applied 
himself to the direct and diligent study 
of the monuments of the arts of antiquity 
and of the Italian Renaissance. The bent 
[22] 



OXFORD 

of his own work is henceforth determined. 
He is now become the frank and thor- 
oughgoing "humanist." 

We must remember that by 1865 the 
Tractarian Movement had spent much of 
its force as the inspiration or the pertur- 
bation of Oxford Fellows. To a young 
man of Pater's stamp two courses opened. 
He might give himself up to the influ- 
ence of men like Maurice and Martineau, 
endeavouring so to escape from the trend 
of the current Darwinism, or he might, 
with certain reservations, accept the sci- 
entific doctrines of the evolutionists, ally 
himself to the aesthetic movement begun 
by Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelite broth- 
erhood, and strive by close and sympa- 
thetic study of the humanities, as the 
[23] 



WALTER PATER 
ground for the humanisation and realisa- 
tion of aesthetic theory, to give to that 
movement greater consideration and a 
wider acceptance. The cogency of tem- 
perament impelled Pater to the latter 
course. In 1866 came his first publica- 
tion, a fragment on Coleridge, in the 
Westminster Review. In its unrevised 
form this was chiefly concerned with cer- 
tain humane aspects of Coleridge's philo- 
sophic thought. Then, in 1867, came the 
great essay on "Winckelmann," an expo- 
sition of Goethe's so-called naturalism 
and a defence of the Hellenic or aesthet- 
ical view of life. A year later, appreci- 
ating the significance of the recent work 
of William Morris, he wrote his study of 
"iEsthetic Poetry." Thus by 1869 he 
[24] 



OXFORD 
became recognised as the holder and de- 
fender of a definite and individual posi- 
tion in all matters artistic. In this year, 
as Mr. Gosse has recorded, he began 
wearing, with his frock-coat and top-hat, 
a silk tie of brilliant apple-green in token 
that he was "henceforth no longer a pro- 
vincial philosopher, but a critic linked to 
London and the modern arts." 

From 1869 to 1886, notwithstanding 
his affiliation with metropolitan criticism, 
Pater continued to live the more or less 
cloistered life of a university fellow. 
Soon he became distinguished as one of 
the first of Oxford dons to bring a care- 
fully studied taste to the arrangement 
and decoration of his rooms. He wished 
always to have by him a few fine and 
[25] 



WALTER PATER 
beautiful objects, but he had none of the 
instinct of the virtuoso 01 collector; so it 
were beautiful, he took as keen a pleasure 
in the skilful copy of coin, or vase, or 
picture, as in the priceless original. 

Notwithstanding his temperamental 
shyness and reserve, Walter Pater would 
seem to have been a very companionable 
person, always, as he would say, making 
the most of the "sympathetic ties" of hu- 
man life. Gradually, and doubtless al- 
most imperceptibly to himself, he became 
a quietly dominant leader of the intel- 
lectual life of the university. With the 
Oxford youth he was popular, and, like 
many another bachelor teacher, he seems 
to have given to his favourite boys a cer- 
tain wealth of idealised sentiment, which 
[26] 



OXFORD 
most men expend otherwise. As has been 
the way of true humanists, always and 
everywhere, he was peculiarly sensitive 
to the spontaneities of young life, with 
its light affections, with its prof ounder 
hero-worships, and, above all, with its 
unblurred gracefulness of body. In his 
later "Greek Studies" he recurs delight- 
fully to the visions of Hellenic youth he 
has found at Thames-side, and to the 
wandering shade of pagan melancholy he 
has seen darkening in young English 
eyes. 

Sometimes, however, as happened with 
Tennyson, his shyness and reserve pro- 
duced an effect not far from rudeness. 
His friend of later years, Mr. William 
Sharp, relates: 

[27] 



WALTER PATER 

"Often I have seen some fellow-don 
wave a greeting which either he did not 
see or pretended not to see, and it was 
rare that his eyes rested on any under- 
graduate who saluted him unless the eva- 
sion would be too obviously discourteous. 
On the other hand, he would now and 
again go out of his way to hail and speak 
cordially to some young fellow in whom 
he felt a genuine interest. " 

In a memorial sermon preached by one 
of Pater's friends, many years after the 
time of which I am writing, there is an 
account of his academic character which 
may properly be quoted here, to correct 
the current impression that there was 
over much of Sybaritism in his life: 

"Naturally inclined to a certain rigour 
[28] 



OXFORD 
in discipline, he was full of excuse for in- 
dividual cases ; and regretted and thought 
over stern measures more than most mem- 
bers of a governing body can afford to 
do. The pains he took about his frequent 
hospitality was a sign of the conscientious 
thoroughness with which he performed 
the most trivial actions of life. And this 
explains the slowness of his composition 
and the classical smallness of the bulk of 
his writings. 

"To a certain extent, but to a certain 
extent only, these may be taken as an 
index to his character, as unveiling the 
true man. But to those who knew him as 
he lived among us here, they seemed a 
sort of disguise. There was the same ten- 
derness, the same tranquillising repose 
[29] 



WALTER PATER 
about his conversation that we find in his 
writings, the same carefulness in trifles 
and exactness of expression. But his 
written works betray little trace of that 
childlike simplicity, that naive joyous- 
ness, that never-wearying pleasure in 
animals and their ways, that grave yet 
half -amused seriousness, also childlike, in 
which he met the events of the daily 
routine. His habits were precise and 
austere, in some respects simple to the 
last degree — as unlike the current and 
erroneous impression (which certain pas- 
sages of his books may leave) as it is pos- 
sible to conceive; almost the sole luxury 
he allowed himself was a bowl of rose- 
leaves, preserved by an old lady in the 
country from a special receipt, and every 
[30] 



OXFORD 
year as a present to him, as a reminder of 
her friendship. He did not accumulate 
around him an increasing number of un- 
necessary props of life, as so many men 
of sedentary life are unhappily tempted 
to do. He never smoked, rarely took 
tonic or medicine of any kind, and has 
left an example which it would be well if 
every student could follow, spending his 
morning in writing or lecturing, some 
part of the afternoon in correcting the 
composition of the noon, and in the even- 
ing closing up his books entirely — re- 
garding it as folly to attempt to make 
up for idleness in the day by unseason- 
able labour at a time when reading men 
are best in bed." 

In the summer throughout his residence 
[31] 



WALTER PATER 
at Oxford Pater sought relief from his 
lecturing in tours afoot upon the Conti- 
nent. Indeed, ranging pedestrianism was 
always his chosen diversion; and one is a 
little surprised to learn that he sometimes 
indulged in it to excess, often suffering 
therefrom weariness and exhaustion. It 
is characteristic of his reserved and sta- 
tionary temperament that, fond as he was 
of Continental wanderings, and in spite 
of his excellent literary scholarship in 
German and the Romance languages, 
he could speak with ease no tongue save 
his own. 

The most important business of the ten 

years of Pater's life between 1870 and 

1880 was the slow and loving composition 

of most of his best critical essays. In 

[32] 



OXFORD 

1873 appeared his first book — indeed the 
only one before "Marius" in 1885; this 
was the volume entitled "The Renais- 
sance: Studies in Art and Poetry." In 
the eight essays which it contained — five 
reprinted from the magazines, and three 
new — together with the Preface and Con- 
clusion, Pater contrived to present a sum- 
mary of the humanistic tendencies of the 
Renaissance, and with it some special 
pleading for his own so-called Cyrenaic 
philosophy of life. This volume, which 
has proved the most popular of his works, 
has already appeared in eight editions, no 
mean record for a book of its class. To- 
gether with "Marius," the more ardent 
Paterians have usually esteemed it their 
most canonical Scripture. 
[33] 



WALTER PATER 
It was this volume that won Pater the 
distinction of being satirised in the excel- 
lent company of Jowett, Arnold, Ruskin, 
and Huxley. In 1877 "The New Re- 
public" appeared anonymously, to be 
fathered not long after upon Mr. W. H. 
Mallock. The scheme of the book is 
rather clever. There is a Saturday-to- 
Monday party at an English country 
house. The persons who have been gath- 
ered dispute freely of faith, culture, phil- 
osophy, and life, and the inconclusiveness 
of the debate is made to burlesque the fu- 
tility of various contemporary intellectual 
movements. Pater is represented by Mr. 
Rose, a "pre-Raphaelite" with a very pale 
face and very heavy moustache. In the 
[34] 



OXFORD 

first volume he is a rather silentious per- 
son who spends most of his time looking 
out of the window at sunsets, or helping 
at his tasks a rosy-cheeked boy with fair 
golden hair. But in the second volume 
he takes advantage of a psychological 
moment to soliloquise dreamily, some- 
what to the weariness of the company, 
concerning the lesson of the art of the 
Renaissance, the glorification of sensa- 
tion. His talk is a skilful cento of 
phrases deftly conveyed from Pater's 
"Conclusion" to The Renaissance, and his 
characteristic diction, cadence, and allu- 
siveness are parodied with considerable 
felicity. His so-called "paganism" is also 
introduced, and the well-meaning but un- 
[35] 



WALTER PATER 
inspired Lady Ambrose is made to ex- 
claim, upon the titillation of her lady-like 
sensibility: "What an odd man Mr. Rose 
is ! He always seems to talk of everybody 
as if they had no clothes on." The satire, 
as a whole, is not always pleasant, and 
often it is unjust; but it serves to show 
the way in which Pater has been taken 
by many people, perverse indeed, yet not 
without some show of sanity to their 
credit. 

After the publication of the "Renais- 
sance" Pater continued his care-taking 
composition at the average rate of two 
studies each year. By 1881 the majority 
of his essays in art and letters had been 
written and printed in the magazines. 
The bulk of his work done after that year 
[36] 



OXFORD 

is comprised in "Marius," "Plato and 
Platonism," "Imaginary Portraits," and 
other imaginative or philosophic studies 
resembling them. 



[37] 



Ill 

CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 

One sometimes thinks that the nine- 
teenth century was never completely 
cured of that world-malady of its middle 
age which became chronic from the first 
romantic green-sickness of its youth. 
Among the obscurer and less remarked 
symptoms of this disease was its easy 
catholicity of taste, its lack of normal 
narrowness in literary matters. There 
was something virile, in spite of limita- 
tions, in an age which could say with 
Pepys that "A Midsummer Night's 
Dream" was "the foolishest play" that 
ever it saw. In the surcease of bitter, 
bookish dislikes and complacent deprecia- 
[38] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
tions, in the profuse geniality of literary 
judgments the nineteenth in its maturity 
was the Hamlet of the centuries. Of this 
affable, retrospective turn in the mind of 
his age Walter Pater is an excellent ex- 
ample. One of the first impressions which 
the considerate reader derives from his 
criticism is that of the absence from it of 
the note of personal antipathy; and this 
is likely to be coupled with a perception 
of the wide area of bookland which it 
drains. 

Pater was a man of adventurous men- 
tal temperament, and in those long, 
leisurely years . at Oxford he voyaged 
through strange, and sometimes perilous, 
seas of thought. He read voluminously; 
and preserved from his reading, by the 
[39] 



WALTER PATER 
aid of innumerable little squares of paper, 
immense stores of impressions and ideas. 
The reader of his essays will find therein 
not only a sympathetic, but even a re- 
spectably exact, knowledge of enough 
departments of scholarship to provide a 
decent outfit of mental furniture for 
some half-dozen academic specialists. He 
knew his English, Continental, Latin, 
and Greek literature as a scholar knows 
them; of philosophy, both ancient and 
modern, he possessed a knowledge more 
than usually close, and much more than 
usually realising; and in art he was a 
connoisseur. He devoted his life to the 
pursuit of that "comparative literature/' 
or Culturgeschichte, which has been one 
of the late developments of the Baconian 
[40] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
organisation of learning. But he brought 
to his study none of the a priori prepos- 
sessions, Hegelian, Darwinian, or what 
not, which so many scholars have lugged 
into this field. Rather he approached his- 
tory, philosophy, literature, art in the 
temper of the old, all-embracing human- 
ism, striving to put flesh on old bones, to 
give to ancient lives a vivid personal 
realisation, so as to fulfil his own. Hence 
it came about that, while his work is 
in a sense bookish, it was, nevertheless, 
strangely vital and close to the trend of 
the general life. He undertook the 
"compellation," as old writers say, of the 
experience of the Western World. He 
held as the essence of his humanism the 
belief that "nothing which has ever inter- 
[41] 



WALTER PATER 
ested living men and women can wholly 
lose its vitality; no language they have 
spoken, no oracle beside which they have 
hushed their voices, no dream which has 
once been entertained by actual human 
minds, nothing about which they have 
been passionate or expended time and 
zeal." So holding fast this old doctrine 
of nihil humani alienum, he strove by 
retrospective generalisation upon the past 
life of the world not to minimise the 
actual details of personal life, but to 
enrich them with the significance of the 
whole; not to disown the present, but to 
chasten to-day by the solemn procession 
of yesterdays. It is hard to see what 
worthier end scholarship could propose to 
herself. 

[42] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
Although Pater carried to his multi- 
farious studies no rigid metaphysical no- 
tions, he was not slow to formulate, and 
to express in the "Renaissance," certain 
clear opinions upon the method of aes- 
thetics and the function of art. Some 
consideration of these must precede any 
attention to the details of his literary and 
artistic criticism. 

The man who had such care for things 
tangible and visible, who, like Montaigne, 
had come to esteem the more doctrinaire 
philosophy of his day nothing better than 
poetry sophisticated, will have none of 
any aesthetic theory which may tend to fix 
too stolidly the shy spirit of beauty. He 
will admit to his court, with their aesthetic 
formulae and theoretic distinctions, Kant 
[43] 



WALTER PATER 
and Hegel and Schiller and Cousin and 
Ruskin; but he will not suffer them to 
enshroud, with any stiff, academic dra- 
pery of definition, the pure line and 
bright colour of the beauty he would con- 
template. 

"Beauty," he tells us, "like all other 
qualities presented to human experience, 
is relative; and the definition of it be- 
comes unmeaning and useless in propor- 
tion to its abstractness. To define beauty, 
not in the most abstract, but in the most 
concrete terms possible, to find not a uni- 
versal formula for it, but the formula 
which expresses most adequately this or 
that special manifestation of it, is the aim 
of the true student of aesthetics." 

While this forbids him to discuss ulti- 
[44 J 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
mate metaphysical theories of beauty, it 
is no bar to reflection upon the nature 
and function of art; and it was in this 
field that Pater deployed as an aesthetic 
philosopher. When his theorising is re- 
duced to its simplest terms it may be 
stated in brief compass. Art, he held, is 
the expression of the beauty which is 
found in the world by the imaginative 
vision; its purpose is the enrichment of 
life. 

The Ruskinian theory, as sometimes 
interpreted, that art is a kind of serving- 
maid to piety, was odious to him. But 
while he contends that the business of art 
is simply to afford us intense and noble 
pleasure, later in "Marius" he expressly 
affirms that, at its highest, this pleasure 
[45] 



WALTER PATER 
cannot fail to furnish an ethical motive 
and impulse. 

Within these broad outlines he compre- 
hended many refinements of aesthetic the- 
ory. Of these the one usually thought 
most characteristic of Pater, against 
which the embattled hosts of criticism 
have advanced, is the notion stated most 
clearly in "The School of Giorgione," 
that the norm of art, the limiting form 
toward which all good art constantly 
tends, is music; that lyrical poetry, by 
reason of its musicalness, is the highest 
form of literature ; that the other arts are 
but other kinds of musical harmony; that 
architecture, even, is but music petrified, 
a harmony in stone. It must be con- 
fessed that even in "The Renaissance" 
[46] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
Pater does not keep quite consistently to 
his theory. At times he seems, like Poe 
or Baudelaire, to choose music as his typi- 
cal art because of its fluidity or ethereal- 
ity, its way of weaving mystical spells 
about our mood, its power of catching 
directly at emotion, and of reproducing 
it with the slightest mediation of material 
symbols and with the least demand for in- 
tellectual interpretation. At other times 
he shifts his point of view until it is the 
sensuousness of music that we see most 
clearly. Again music will be used in a 
Platonic sense in which the intellectual 
element of harmony is preponderant. 
Here it is the ordered symphonies of art 
he is thinking of; their usefulness in the 
precipitation of cloudy moods, or as a 
[47] 



WALTER PATER 
homoeopathic cure for morbid enthusiasm. 
But as a strict and, as it were, logarhyth- 
mic structure is equally necessary to all 
arts, he is led sometimes to a kind of 
classical and Aristotelian aesthetic, with a 
severe insistence upon "structure," into 
which few other expounders of the "musi- 
cal" theory of art would care to follow 
him. This theory is nowhere presented 
systematically, and in the context where 
the fragments of it occur they are usually 
unimpeachable; yet the drift of it all has 
proved liable to misconception. It is a 
delicate affair to hold that because music 
is the most purely and directly suggestive 
of the arts, it is, therefore, the most "spir- 
itual." One cannot maintain this unless 
he is also prepared to hold that clear ideas 
[48] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
in themselves are less "of the spirit" than 
undefined emotions, and become spiritual- 
ised as they grow vague. This conten- 
tion, which is so dear to the happy hearts 
of some of our modern mystics, is, when 
stated in this form, clearly rubbish. 

But by such perennial, metaphysical 
pothers as this Pater was not greatly dis- 
turbed. All he sought was some formula 
for an art which should express, as he at 
that time conceived Goethe's to express 
it, the objective variety of modern life, its 
subtile and complex inwardness. In the 
essay on Winckelmann he puts the case 
thus: 

"For us necessity is not, as of old, a 
sort of mythological personage without 
us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a 
[49] 



WALTER PATER 
magic web woven through and through 
us, like that magnetic system of which 
modern science speaks, penetrating us 
with a network subtiler than our subtilest 
nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces 
of the world. Can art express this with 
Hellenic blitheness and originality?" * 

This was the question which Pater set 
himself to answer step by step, in his 
specific criticisms of painters, prosemen, 
and poets. It is in the actual application, 
in his intimately sympathetic approach, in 
his untiring care of analysis that this 
point of view became effective in criticism. 

* The pervasiveness of such thought is strikingly illus- 
trated in that formula of the "nouvelle humanisme" for 
which M. Gregh stands in France : Nous devons imiter les 
Grecs, nos maitres, en faisont §a qyCils feraient, sHls ressus- 
citaient parmi nous. 

[50] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
Pater's art criticism was never exclu- 
sively concerned either with the material 
or with the ideal aspects of art. It 
was the misty mid-region of "expressive- 
ness" that he took for his peculiar prov- 
ince. With his respect for the bodily eye 
he was always — in specific criticism as in 
the general theory — peculiarly sensitive 
to the purely sensuous beauty of line and 
colour in painting, curve in sculpture, light 
and shade in architecture, and even to the 
exquisite prettiness or bizarre quaintness 
of articles of vertu. He cared more than 
most critics for chryselephantine richness, 
for the luxury of ivory and gold; and in 
insisting upon this liking, especially in the 
later "Greek Studies," he did good service 
in balancing the abstracting tendency, 
[51] 



WALTER PATER 
which, since Lessing, had tended to over- 
refine most judgments passed upon art. 
But, on the other hand, he never went so 
far in this direction as to flatter mere 
purse-proud vertuosity. He never lost 
sight of the world of truth under that 
overworked formula, "the typical signifi- 
cance of pure form." Not Michelangelo, 
not Walt Whitman even, could have 
realised more fully the supremacy in the 
imaginative world of the undraped male 
figure. 

The most characteristic and stimulat- 
ing trait in Pater's art criticism is his 
ability to take any given work of art and 
express from it, and elaborate, all those 
vivid, human intimations, vague half- 
reminiscences, or visionary, historic adum- 
[52] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
brations which with most of us form the 
ground of our deepest pleasures., but 
which, in most cases, can never become 
articulate. He does not do this, as some 
have done it, by a single act of the inter- 
pretative imagination disclosing the ob- 
ject and its relations for us as if in a 
sudden gleam of white light. Rather, he 
studies history, biography, letters, frag- 
mentary remains, all the flotsam and jet- 
sam of the past, and revives the atmos- 
phere, or — to use a word savouring of the 
shop — the milieu of the artist; then he 
subjects the painter's work to a kind of 
long, mystic meditation, until by virtue 
of his mediumship we behold the very 
spirit of it, and even partake of the 
mood wherein it was created. He chose 
[53] 



WALTER PATER 
by preference the work of fluid, ro- 
mantic periods of transition foreshadow- 
ing the complexity of his own time — the 
"anxious and wistful" ages of Greece, 
Hellenizing Rome, Renaissance Italy, 
Italianate France and England, Galliciz- 
ing Germany. In so doing he often in- 
curred the risk of reading himself into his 
subject. But actual transgression in this 
respect is the exception, not the rule. The 
recognition of the truth of most of his in- 
terpretations, even the more subtile, comes 
with instantaneous conviction to the mind 
of the judicious and attentive reader. 

In all his work of this sort one para- 
graph, in its mellow and musical cadence, 
in its close and adroit felicity of charac- 
terisation, and in its charm of historic 
[54] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
suggestiveness, is quite peerless. It has 
been quoted in season and out; often it 
has evoked the foolish face of praise, yet 
no study of Pater could portray his tem- 
perament, or convey the peculiar quality 
of his work at its perfection, which failed 
to recall to the reader the incomparable 
passage on Leonardo Da Vinci's La 
Gioconda: 

"The presence that thus rose so strange- 
ly beside the waters is expressive of what 
in the ways of a thousand years men had 
come to desire. Hers is the head upon 
which all the ends of the world are come 
and the eyelids are a little weary. It is 
a beauty wrought out from within upon 
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of 
strange thoughts and fantastic reveries 
[55] 



WALTER PATER 
and exquisite passions. Set it for a mo- 
ment beside one of those white Greek 
goddesses or beautiful women of antiq- 
uity, and how would they be troubled by 
this beauty, into which the soul with all 
its maladies has passed ! All the thoughts 
and experience of the world have etched 
and moulded there, in that which they 
have of power to refine and make expres- 
sive the outward form, the animalism of 
Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of 
the middle age with its spiritual ambition 
and imaginative loves, the return of the 
Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. 4 
She is older than the rocks among which 
she sits; like the vampire she has been 
dead many times, and learned the secrets 
of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep 
[56] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
seas and keeps their fallen day about her; 
and trafficked for strange webs with East- 
ern merchants; and, as Leda, was the 
mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint 
Anne, the mother of Maryland all this 
has been to her but as the sound of lyres 
and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy 
with which it has moulded the changing 
lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the 
hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, 
sweeping together ten thousand experi- 
ences, is an old one; and modern thought 
has conceived the idea of humanity as 
wrought upon by and summing up in 
itself all modes of thought and life. Cer- 
tainly Lady Lisa might stand as the em- 
bodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of 
the modern idea." 

[57] 



WALTER PATER 
The imaginative interpretation of the 
"sentiment" of pictorial and plastic art 
can go no further safely. This is the 
supreme example of Pater's characteris- 
tic elaboration of "expressiveness." 

It is fairly accurate to affirm that 
Pater's literary criticism was in the tra- 
dition which found its typical expression 
in the "Causeries de Lundi." Sainte- 
Beuve's affair was, in the best sense, 
atmospheric criticism, the criticism of 
knowledge, of the true connoisseur. He 
was a myriad-minded humanist, all things 
to all men, yet a historian withal, a psy- 
chologist, and a trained codifier of tem- 
peraments. Thus two diverse schools of 
criticism have acclaimed him master. The 
[58] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
impressionistic dilettante finds in the per- 
sonal tone of Sainte-Beuve's work war- 
rant for the display of his own fancies; 
while the severer academic critic finds 
therein inspiration to painstaking study 
and analysis, or even to operose compila- 
tion. But, irrespective of such distinc- 
tions and of the abuse of his method, 
Sainte-Beuve still stands as the teacher of 
much that is most humane, genial, and 
wise in the criticism of our time. His 
work is the enduring answer to the pro- 
fane charges which the ceaseless flow of 
literary tittle-tattle or rhodomontade has 
drawn down upon all critical writing. 

Pater was an early student of Sainte- 
Beuve, and, as the sort of criticism he 
found in his pages was in harmony with 
[59] 



WALTER PATER 
his own temperament and scholarly hori- 
zon, he did not delay to adopt much of his 
method. But in one respect Pater's crit- 
ical writing was as much in the best Eng- 
lish traditions of Coleridge and Lamb 
and Hazlitt — of good criticism every- 
where — as in the mould of Sainte-Beuve. 
He had a mind capable of being directly 
and deeply moved by the presence of 
beauty in a piece of literature, and pecu- 
liarly responsive to the distinctive element 
of personality in it. He took the pains 
first of all to realise and discriminate his 
own impressions. Hence he was, togeth- 
er with the earlier romantic critics, among 
the most proficient masters of the art of 
literary interpretation, as he himself ex- 
pounds it: 

[60] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 

"The function of the aesthetic critic is 

to distinguish, analyse, and separate from 

its adjuncts the virtue by which a picture, 

a landscape, a fair personality in life or in 

# a book produces the special impression of 

' beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the 

source of the impression is and under 

what conditions it is experienced." 

As all Pater's criticism is essentially 
of one piece, and in a special sense the 
criticism of personality in literature, it 
may be suggestive to marshal, mediasval- 
wise, all the worthes of whom he has ex- 
tended appreciations, either complete in 
themselves or subsidiary to some other 
study. They come thronging, we may 
imagine, a goodly company, infinitely 
various, but not uncongenial. 
[61] 



WALTER PATER 
As befits his dignity, the procession 
may be headed by the Emperor Marcus 
Aurelius placidly engaged in Stoic medi- 
tation, closely followed by Zeno and 
Pythagoras. Near by, Apuleius, Lucian, 
and Montaigne chat amiably and wisely, 
interrupted now and again by some stut- 
tered, lambent witticism from Elia, who, 
nevertheless, shows quite as much predi- 
lection for the more solemn company of 
Euripides and Sir Thomas Browne. 
Socrates comes genially, surrounded by 
questioning youths ; and Plato, with Gior- 
dano Bruno, and Count Pico of Miran- 
dola hanging upon his words, discourses 
musically as Apollo's lute. In the inter- 
vals of his speech Coleridge takes up the 
thread not unacceptably, though he de- 
[62] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
sists at times to discuss such more sub- 
lunary matters as poetic diction with 
Ronsard, Du Bellay, and Wordsworth. 
Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Goethe 
come together in somewhat Olympian 
state. Yet none is more keenly alive to 
all that passes in the company; Shake- 
speare, we may fancy, passing many a sig- 
nificant comment with Browning, Goethe 
never losing sight of Winckelmann, and 
Michelangelo often looking reverently 
toward Dante, who walks sombrely apart. 
Rossetti and William Morris, Octave 
Feuillet and Prosper Merimee sort much 
by themselves. Last of the line come 
Pascal and Amiel, holding great argu- 
ment of faith and doubt; careless of the 
pace, or, perhaps, unable to hold it, they 
[63] 



WALTER PATER 
have lagged far behind. All about are 
figures and faces equally real, yet whose 
names are not in the histories: Denys 
L'Auxerrois, Sebastian Van Storck, 
Gaston de Latour, Marius the Epicu- 
rean. 

Fantastic as it may seem, some such 
Chaucerian gathering as this best conveys 
the final impression of Walter Pater's 
criticism. But to make the roll complete- 
ly comprehensive we should have to in- 
clude many men — Blake, for instance, of 
whom there are no formal appreciations, 
yet to whom there are so many luminous 
passing allusions that exhaustive interpre- 
tations of their writing might almost be 
pieced together. In all Pater's work, on 
the other hand, certain English writers 
[64] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
are, as the ancient and useful Hibernian- 
ism goes, conspicuous by their absence, 
even as the ground for a stray allusion. 
Some of these — Shelley, for example — 
might perhaps have received a formal ap- 
preciation by Pater had longer life been 
granted him. Others, like Swift or John- 
son, the types of somewhat portly virility 
in our literature, seem avoided by deliber- 
ate choice. For all the earlier and cruder 
periods of literature, unless powerfully 
informed by some aspiring romantic 
spirit, his sympathy, in. spite of his hu- 
manism, was limited. He has little to say 
of the ninth century or of the fourteenth. 
But this is not to be charged against him 
as unfortunate limitation. Even the 
myriad-minded humanist cannot concern 
[65] 



WALTER PATER 
himself with everything, and, even in crit- 
icism, elective affinities have their use. 

As in Pater's criticism of art, so in that 
of literature the chief charm is the en- 
gaging intimacy of understanding. Pie 
wrote, to adapt Wordsworth's phrase, 
"with his eye on the document." In his 
diligent, cosmopolitan reading he pre- 
served upon his little squares of paper the 
flashes of interpretative intuition and 
sympathy which come swarmingly but 
evanescently to the ripe and responsive 
reader. But these were never fitted to- 
gether hastily or at haphazard. He never 
made a crazy-quilt of his notes. Nor did 
he ever attempt, as some have done, to dis- 
embowel his theme — to tear the heart out 
of it. It seems to have been his way, when 
166} 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
this harvest of notes was duly garnered, 
to brood over his subject in a long, ana- 
lytical scrutiny, until, with a clear and 
complete vision of the whole in his mind, 
each piece of suggestive detail would fall 
into its rightful place and relation. This 
formative process was aided by — as it cul- 
minated in— a rare power of literary gen- 
eralisation. Who but he, for example, 
could have written those parallel studies 
of Greek art and religion, "Demeter" 
and "Dionysus"? What other among 
contemporary critics could have traced the 
slow evolution of an ancient popular 
mythos so cunningly and subtilely, with 
such a convincing embodiment of stray 
hints of meaning, and such a full imagi- 
native realisation of old-world dream. 
[67] 



WALTER PATER 

It was by virtue of the same method 
strictly followed through all its stages 
that he produced his memorable literary 
judgments. It was thus that he contrived 
such satisfactory critical essays as that 
which displays Shakespeare's English 
kings as protagonists of the irony of 
kingship, types of average human nature 
flung with wonderfully dramatic effect 
into the vortex of great events; or that 
which portrays Sir Thomas Browne as 
the supreme expression of the sombre, 
thaumaturgic, atrabilious, yet loquacious 
mood of his century ; or those which bring 
us to know Pico Mirandola with his 
beauty and his aureate, Platonic visions, 
and the heart of Wordsworth in the pas- 
sion and mysticity of the best of his 
[68] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
poetry. Other critics may have surpassed 
him in dash and brilliancy of attack; a 
very few, perhaps, were superior in pro- 
found penetration into the depths of the 
greatest natures; but in the power of 
sympathetic interpretation of the diverse 
writers whom, at some point, his tempera- 
ment touched, and in the gift of phrasing 
perfectly subtile shades of his meaning, 
Walter Pater had no superiors and few 
peers. 

It is, of course, impossible to dwell long 
upon this branch of Mr. Pater's work 
without bringing it into comparison with 
that of the man whom recent English 
literary opinion has generally recognised 
as its master. It is neither possible nor 
desirable to make a formal comparison 
[69] 



WALTER PATER 
between Mr. Pater and Mr. Arnold, or 
to draw up an estimate to scale, but it may 
not be wholly idle to notice some points 
of opposition. 

If we place Arnold's essay upon Mar- 
cus Aurelius beside those chapters of 
"Marius"— the twelfth to the fifteenth— 
which deal with the same theme, the dif- 
ference will be apparent. And this dif- 
ference, so obvious here in the treatment 
of a single subject, may be traced almost 
as easily in all their critical writing. Pa- 
ter's sensibilities seem the keener, and, as 
is to be expected from his more retired 
and academic life, his general scholarship 
is better, his information more detailed 
and exact. He had more than Arnold of 
that personal knowledge of many remote 
[70] 



CRITICISM OF ART AND LETTERS 
minor writers which is essential to the full 
atmospheric criticism of their more fa- 
mous contemporaries. One feels that, 
save for occasional excursions to the 
shrine of some minor writer of "distinc- 
tion," Arnold kept more strictly to the 
highroad of literature, and in so doing 
lost a little in knowledge of the country. 
On the other hand, Pater's criticism never 
moves with the bright speed of Arnold's. 
It is no clear, luciferous stream of prose 
with the sunlight of humour playing upon 
its surface and penetrating its depths. 
This is partly a matter of style, of which 
we shall presently have to speak, but, 
more than that, it is the result of a funda- 
mental diversity in critical mood and 
method. Arnold dealt more in broad, 
[71] 



WALTER PATER 
stoical generalisations, "nobleness of 
soul," "sweet reasonableness," "sweetness 
and light," and other "chief and principal 
things" which are pregnant and luminous 
only so far as the reader shares in the 
particular quality. Notwithstanding his 
struggles of faith, his foregatherings 
with Obermann and Heine, he was always 
Arnold of Rugby's son. He never lost a 
certain beneficent singleness of mind. 
Beside him Pater was more of the myr- 
iad-minded humanist, more like that typi- 
cal humanist of the old time, Dr. Thomas 
Browne of Norwich, of a constitution so 
general that it consorts and sympathises 
with all things. 



[72] 



IV 

PHILOSOPHIC FICTION AND THE ART 
OF STYLE 

Although in the preceding account we 
have viewed by anticipation much that 
came after, we must now revert to 1881 
to pick up the chronological thread of 
our author's life. If the obliging reader 
will take the trouble to glance at the bib- 
liographical table of Mr. Pater's life and 
work he will notice that, with the single 
exception of the essay upon Rossetti, 
written in 1883, the years from 1881 to 
1885 were given to the composition of 
his masterpiece, "Marius the Epicurean." 
Even with the abundant leisure afforded 
by his academic life, and with the addi- 
tional advantage of the winter of 1882 
[73] 



WALTER PATER 
spent in Rome, it is a wonder that a work 
so full of significant detail, so assiduously 
filed and polished, so maturely ripened, 
could have been carried to completion 
within even that ample time. At any rate, 
so exacting was the labour that nothing 
else was done by Pater within those years 
to need our attention. 

The publication of "Marius" in 1885, 
coming after the Renaissance and the 
long series of notable magazine essays, 
finally established Pater's reputation as a 
writer of very unusual quality and distinc- 
tion. It was received almost everywhere 
with the highest terms of respect in the 
professional reviewer's phrase-book, and 
at the hands of at least two critics, Mr. 
Sharp in the Athenceum and Mr. Wood- 
[W] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
berry in the Nation, it met something like 
adequate and discriminating appreciation. 
It was felt at once by discriminating 
readers that Marius himself was not so 
much an ancient Epicurean, or even the 
perennial type of the aesthetic moralist, as 
the protagonist of a certain tendency 
which the author held to be vital in the 
thoughtful life 01 his own age; or, per- 
haps, a lyrical personage feigned for pur- 
poses of self -explanation. It was upon 
this ground that the book deserved and 
found recognition. But this matter of the 
new Cyrenaicism or the sesthetical conduct 
of life is best deferred to a later chapter. 
All that need be done now is to notice 
some of the more obvious qualities of the 
book. 

[75] 



WALTER PATER 
Persons of taste and cultivation were 
attracted to "Marius" chiefly by three 
traits: by the richness of the scholarship 
displayed in it, by the power of the inter- 
pretative imagination — which conceived 
the life of Marius sharply and clearly 
amid his so various environment, subordi- 
nating each learned and archaeological de- 
tail to its due place in the whole composi- 
tion — and by its suave and seductive grace 
of style. The deftly inlaid episodes, like 
that beautifully light and poetic version 
of "Cupid and Psyche" done out of Apu- 
leius, or the eloquent oration of Aurelius, 
cunningly developed out of his Medita- 
tions, were done on the highest level of 
Pater's art. But nowhere is his peculiar 
ability seen to better advantage than in 
[76] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
the delicious Socratic dialogue between 
Lucian and Hermotimus. Berkeley or 
Landor, even FitzGerald, never handled 
the form better. Indeed it might almost 
have been done by Plato himself. There 
is in it the tortuous yet steady progression 
of thought relieved by dramatic turns and 
quick, subtile reverses, which is the prime 
charm of form in Plato's art. The doc- 
trinaire boy Hermotimus, caught in the 
logical net by the systematic scepticism of 
Lucian, struggles as naturally and inef- 
fectually as Crito or Protagoras enmeshed 
by Socrates. And it is all presented in 
an admirably concrete and analogical 
style, enlivened by little apologues quite 
in the manner of Plato. 

After the publication of "Marius," 
[77] 



WALTER PATER 
slight changes may be seen in the man- 
ner of Pater's life and in the direction of 
his literary activities. In 1886 he took a 
house at Kensington. From this time on 
he came more and more to be in demand 
as a lecturer and as a reviewer extraordi- 
nary of new books of a kind that appealed 
to him. In the period of his residence at 
Kensington he contributed some twenty 
long and careful review articles, both 
signed and unsigned, to the Guardian, 
the Nineteenth Century, the Pall Mall 
Gazette, and the Athenceum. Some of 
these, like the notice of Mrs. Ward's 
"Amiel's Journal/' are little essays or 
appreciations, quite in his familiar vein. 
While the majority are occasional papers 
of small permanent interest, none is de- 
[78] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
void of very considerable suggestiveness 
to the critic of Pater's personality and 
literary product. As a reviewer he was 
genial, sympathetic, friendly; eager to 
praise and loth to censure, often passing 
in silence defects which he could not have 
failed to observe. The review of "Robert 
Elsmere," for example, is typical of all. 
Here, as in all his reviews of fiction, Pater 
is unaffectedly delighted with the people 
and their story, and has no excessive con- 
cern for social or theological problems 
which may be involved in the plot. But 
it is important to notice that what little 
he does have to say concerning this last 
matter is in a somewhat deprecatory and 
churchman-like vein. The style of these 
papers is also remarkable. It is, of 
[79] 



WALTER PATER 
course, less carefully wrought than usual 
with him, more brisk and buoyant, and 
written with a more running pen. But at 
times, when led by habit into a long sen- 
tence, without the time for his wonted 
phlegmatic correction, he produced peri- 
ods so obscure and cumbersome as to be 
unparalleled elsewhere in his work. 

One of the effects of the long labour 
of " Marius" was to develop the creative 
element of Pater's genius, to increase his 
skill at a certain sort of narrative. With 
the exception of "The Child in the 
House," printed in a magazine in 1878, 
all of his work to 1881 had consisted in 
the criticism or interpretation of art and 
letters. As we have seen, a creative ele- 
ment was involved even in this; but with 
[80] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
"Marius" he came to be a writer of imag- 
inative philosophic studies, cast in the 
form of uneventful fiction. Afterward 
came the series of four imaginary por- 
traits, "A Prince of Court Painters/' 
"Denys L'Auxerrois," " Sebastian Van 
Storck," and "Duke Carl of Rosenmold," 
all printed in Macmillans Magazine from 
1885 to 1887, and collected into a volume 
in the latter year. Then in 1888, in the 
same magazine, came the five chapters of 
"Gaston de Latour," which have brought 
delight to many. In 1889 he wrote a very 
similar study, one of his rarest achieve- 
ments in poetic symbolism, "Hippolytus 
Unveiled." "Emerald Uthwart," printed 
in 1892, was nearest of all to the ordinary 
type of fiction in which things happen, 
[81] 



WALTER PATER 
and least heavily freighted with philo- 
sophic lore. Finally, in 1893, appeared 
that delightfully suggestive fantasy of 
the after-movement of the Hellenic spirit, 
"Apollo in Picardy." 

To sympathetic readers, who fell upon 
these studies damp from the press, there 
came upon the instant a perception of 
their beauty and power which set them 
far apart from the mass of current litera- 
ture. And, indeed, they are by no means 
the least enduring part of Pater's work. 
They contain many passages of sound 
and suggestive artistic, literary, or philo- 
sophic criticism, and much of the imagi- 
native, poetic criticism of life which is the 
business of creative literature. Hippol- 
ytus, through all his ardent youth, de- 
[82] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
voted to the pursuit of remote and diffi- 
cult wisdom; Sebastian Van Storck, the 
remorseless, Spinozistic idealist, who, by- 
forsaking the actual humanities of life, 
comes to strange grief — these and the rest 
are rare but universal types. They have 
a special meaning to modern young men 
of an uncommercial turn. Finally, it is in 
these portraits and fantasies that the 
Pateresque style is found in its most 
characteristic and elaborate individuality. 

It is with diffidence and concern that 
one approaches a theme which, as many 
critics would assert, involves Pater's chief 
merit and distinction, and, as some of the 
wicked hold, his peculiar offence — his 
style or literary manner. In 1888 his 
[83] 



WALTER PATER 
famous essay on " Style" was published 
in the Fortnightly Review, to be printed 
a year later as the initial or tonic paper 
in his collected "Appreciations." This, 
then, is the logical and chronological place 
in which to take some account of his sty- 
listic theory and practice. This account 
may perhaps fulfil our impression of his 
work hitherto, and may bridge the way 
to a final summary of his philosophy of 
life. 

The essay on " Style" is a plea for the 
cultivation of consciously artistic and 
scholarly prose to offset the hasty, slap- 
dash impressionism, which Pater felt to 
be the cardinal sin of the prose of his 
time. With Flaubert for his master and 
model, he writes both soundly and seduc- 
[84] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
tively of "charm and lucid order and 
labour of the file." The ends of style he 
held to be beauty and expressiveness. He 
would have agreed with Spencer that the 
fundamental principle of it is the econ- 
omy of attention, and with Michelangelo 
that it consists in the purgation of super- 
fluities ; but, with a rather unusually com- 
plex notion of the meaning of "beauty" 
and "expressiveness," he demanded more 
of prose style than might at first seem to 
be involved in those famous formulae. 
Pater's artistic ideal demanded full and 
precise truth in the expression of his 
thought. This meant the thoughtful ma- 
nipulation of sentences into as exact con- 
formity as might be with the subtile 
intentions of his own mind. This, he 
[85] 



WALTER PATER 
taught, might be attained by a fourfold 
effort: by closely meditated architectonic 
structure to attain the ordo concatenati- 
oque veri; by scholarly advantage taken 
of the minutest principles of syntax; by 
an attention to musical cadence, so to 
work upon the mood of the reader as to 
bring it to accord with the writer's mood ; 
and, finally, by an unflagging quest of 
the proper word, the one predestined 
mate for each single meaning. 

To look at the question from a more 
technical point of view, Pater's ideal of 
a good style, like all such theories, was a 
matter mainly of two things — sentence 
structure and diction. Of the first he had 
said, in a sentence of a form singularly 
illustrative of its content: "The blithe, 
[86] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
crisp sentence, decisive as a child's ex- 
pression of its needs, may alternate with 
the long-contending, victoriously intricate 
sentence, the sentence born with the in- 
tegrity of a single word, relieving the 
sort of sentence in which, if you look 
closely, you can see much contrivance, 
much adjustment to bring a highly quali- 
fied matter into compass at one view," 

As for that one inevitable word, Pater 
saw that in holding this to be actually 
attainable, Flaubert had entered upon a 
belief which must ultimately bring him 
to despair. No matter how proper the 
words, mere linguistic symbols, with all 
their wealth of association, can never im- 
part all the fulness of the creative idea, 
with its warmth and colour and vital glow, 
[87] 



WALTER PATER 
its silver lights and silences. But he held, 
nevertheless, that like the philosophic pur- 
suit of truth, irrespective of the attain- 
ment or non-attainment of the absolute, 
the artistic quest of the one veracious 
word brought its own reward. In short, 
Pater's effort was always directed toward 
the attainment of fine and full veracity, 
"the whole truth." It is a thousand pities 
that the high-falutin ravage of some of 
his imitators has brought discredit upon 
Pater. This confused injustice is doubt- 
less a mark of an intellectual flabbiness 
incapable of appreciating the austerity of 
mind which, in Pater's case, lay under the 
manner. 

This was Pater's theory of style, and 
his practice shows a much stricter agree- 
[88] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
merit with it than is often to be found 
between these two discordant sisters. 
Pater's prose is obviously not Attic prose. 
Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman, 
among the Victorians, came nearer to 
that, and how different they are from 
Pater! Nor is it Asiatic; it has little of 
De Quincey's florid luxuriance, his Cice- 
ronian rhythms, and Persian pomp. To 
keep to the figure for suggestion rather 
than definition, Pater's style is African in 
its flavour. It is a characteristic product 
of an Alexandrine society, too urbane 
ever to be grandiloquent, yet too curious 
in its scholarship, too profuse of its sym- 
pathies to be quite content with simple, 
Addisonian clarity. 

Walter Pater might have said with an 
[89] 



WALTER PATER 
essayist of old time: "To me a cursus 
philosophicus is an impertinency in folio 
and the reading of it a laborious idleness.'' 
His own work was always in the form of 
the essay; for, in a very real sense, the 
chapters of "Marius" or "Plato and Pla- 
tonism" are essays at many subjects. 
Now, like the eclogue in poetry, the essay 
has many and peculiar advantages for 
him who would arrive as near as may be 
to perfection of form. It is long enough 
to afford an orderly and fairly compre- 
hensive view of its subject, and so short 
as to admit of repeated polishings and 
the most minute care for all the smallest 
details of composition. Of this property 
in his form Pater took conscientious ad- 
vantage. He wrote, it is said, with the 
[90] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
most painful toiling; sometimes his work 
produced such utter exhaustion that — 
with his mind "lined with black," as old 
Burton would say — he could find no good 
in his most perfect periods. The method 
of his composition has been often re- 
counted. The first draft of an essay was 
written upon specially prepared paper 
with the lines far apart, each word widely 
detached from its fellows. Then he 
would go over and over it, filling in be- 
tween the lines, qualifying, amplifying, 
intensifying, until the page brimmed over 
with words. Then he would copy it out 
in the same way as at first, and begin the 
process of revision anew. This he would 
do many times, until the result satisfied 
him in sufficient measure for publication. 
[91] 



WALTER PATER 
But sometimes, before this consumma- 
tion, he would have the galley-proofs of 
an essay struck off at his own expense, 
that by actually seeing his work in type 
he might revise or rearrange it to better 
advantage. He has been called by some 
a slovenly writer, but while there are cer- 
tain mannerisms in his work which, from 
one point of view, might seem to give 
some colour of truth to this characterisa- 
tion, it is, nevertheless, a misconception of 
his quality. There are singularly few 
evidences of actual carelessness anywhere 
in his writings. 

Pater was, indeed, pre-eminently a 

scholarly writer. This does not mean 

that he was quite a purist. He was not 

above coining a form if it served his turn, 

[92] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
and for certain French words and relative 
constructions he had a fondness hardly 
warranted under the self-denying ordi- 
nance of the purist. But he was a schol- 
arly writer in his use of the rich resources 
of the English tongue. He plays deftly, 
for example, with the archaic, radical 
meaning of words like express \, entertain, 
or mortified \ never using the inherent, 
hidden meaning so crassly as to perturb 
the untutored reader, yet always with a 
retrospective, pictorial turn which de- 
lights the scholar. Like all good writers 
he was exquisitely sensitive to the expres- 
sive shading and colour of language. 
With him, as with Marius, "his general 
sense of a fitness and beauty in words 
became effective in daintily pliant sen- 
[93] 



WALTER PATER 
tences, with all sorts of felicitous linking 
of figure to abstraction.'' 

This linking of figure to abstraction is, 
perhaps, the most salient feature of Pa- 
ter's style. Even when treating philo- 
sophic subjects the visible is everywhere 
predominant in his pages. Beautiful ob- 
jects, landscapes, persons are always his 
primary interest; but these are so subli- 
mated by the chrysopoetic alchemy of his 
style that they often attain a profound 
suggestiveness unattainable in more ab- 
stract composition. He had, indeed, 
something of the lyric pantheism which 
can make the flower of the field or the 
cloud in the sky or a stranger's face 
vehicles of personal sentiment and pas- 
sion. 

[94] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
It was largely by virtue of this gift 
that he was enabled to express his inti- 
macies of thought and observation, and 
so to make a certain subtile intimacy the 
chief characteristic of his writing. It was 
thus that he arrived at what he defined in 
another as "That impress of a personal 
quality, a profound expressiveness, what 
the French call intimite, by which is 
meant some subtile sense of originality — 
the seal on a man's work of what is most 
inward and peculiar in his moods and 
manner of apprehension : it is what we call 
expression carried to its highest intensity 
of degree." In this respect Pater's mood 
and manner are as every true artist's must 
be, essentially unique. Other men can 
produce the subtile, intimate, Pateresque 
[95] 



WALTER PATER 
effect once in a while, but he alone could 
do it continuously and consistently, with 
a singular cumulative felicity. 

On the other hand, his manner of com- 
position had its grave disadvantages. It 
can be maintained, with much assurance, 
that it would have been better for Pater 
had he, as a young man, been driven 
by some temporal necessity to write rap- 
idly under pressure. The most noticeable 
quality of his style is the very opposite of 
verve. 

His work as a whole lacks energy, 
speed, carrying power. He had a paren- 
thetical mind. The very Genius of Quali- 
fication followed him through all his 
thinking. And, all too often in his wri- 
ting, instead of selecting from among the 
[96] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
possible qualifications of his idea, he gives 
them all. Hence came the somewhat 
gelatinous quality of his style in his less 
inspired moments. It is translucent, shim- 
mering with colour, but not firm, trans- 
parent, crystalline ; yet, if by this peculiar 
individuality of his manner he loses in 
influence with the running reader, it may 
be that he makes a corresponding and 
compensating gain with the more atten- 
tive student in his closet. His excessive 
modification is often to his reader truly 
a delightful modification — a making of 
mood. And though he is a dangerous 
pattern of style for the young writer 
when he appends modifying clause after 
clause to the wrong side of the proper 
predicate, yet even in these loose periods, 
[97] 



WALTER PATER 
he attains, by virtue of their very laxity, 
a kind of languorous cadence very suit- 
able to his elegiac prose. Only it must 
be confessed that Pater is not an author 
to read straight through. Even the most 
sympathetic reader — perhaps because of 
some original sin of taste in him — will be- 
come at last a little cloyed by such unre- 
lieved intimacy. He will yearn for read- 
ing that is rude and breezy, and sigh for 
the lusty company of Nick Bottom, or 
Sancho Panza, or Tom Jones. 

Yet it is not, as some have thought, 
solemnity of which the reader is weary. 
For Pater, though never witty, is essen- 
tially a humourous writer. This may 
seem a dark saying, but the true admirer 
of Pater will readily understand what is 
[98] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
meant. There is always behind his page 
a subtile and sustained recognition of an 
endless incongruity in the scheme of 
things. In real life he was, as we have 
seen, gleeful and childlike in the playful 
simplicity of his humour ; yet, in his work, 
his mood, though still humourous, or, at 
least, vaguely humoursome, becomes as 
mature and inscrutable as the smile of 
Mona Lisa. It is hard to say whether it is 
humour just ready to sadden into pathos 
or pathos about to gleam into humour. 
Carlyle and Lamb had that mingling, too, 
but with them the alternate change was 
constantly occurring, while with Pater it 
almost never occurred. His normal mood, 
like Lady Lisa's smile, was delicately 
poised between sadness and mirth. Per- 
[99] 



WALTER PATER 
haps it was another symbol of "the mod- 
ern idea." 

We are never tired of saying that im- 
aginative prose is the typical art of our 
time ; that by virtue of its flexible expres- 
siveness it is best fitted to portray inward 
circumstance of complexity and contra- 
diction. It is as a writer of such prose as 
this that Pater is a significant figure in 
English literary history. If his style is 
not the briskest and most strenuous, be- 
cause the strain of life he stands for is not 
the briskest and most strenuous, is it for 
that any the less good style? The final 
question, can art become permanent by 
perfect expressiveness alone? may be left 
open. But surely it is by virtue of just 
such perfect expressiveness that Pater's 
[100] 



PHILOSOPHIC FICTION 
eight volumes are likely to remain a treas- 
ure "for the delighted reading of a schol- 
ar, willing to ponder at leisure, to make 
his way slowly and understand." 



[101] 



V 

"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 
After the publication of "The Renais- 
sance" in 1873, the reviews, becoming 
aware of the religious and philosophic 
scepticism which it implied, and the pe- 
culiar theory of ethics which it explicitly 
defended, speedily bestowed upon its au- 
thor the then (and still) reproachful 
name of "Hedonist." Fearful of misun- 
derstanding, Pater, in 1877, withdrew the 
summary "Conclusion" from the second 
edition. Then in "Marius," and especial- 
ly in the chapter entitled "The New Cy- 
renaicism," he attempted a more elaborate 
exposition and defence of his beliefs. 
Finally, in 1888, in the third edition 
of "The Renaissance," he reinstated that 
[ 102] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

portentous " Conclusion," with slight 
changes, he says, to bring it nearer to his 
original meaning, but really, one fancies, 
to his meaning as modified by maturity. 
Henceforth his "Cyrenaicism" was fairly 
understood, and respected accordingly. 
It should be of advantage to us, then, to 
study Pater's philosophy of life as a 
whole under this self -chosen name. This 
should aid one to conceive more clearly 
the purport and development of his opin- 
ions, and it should help one to a better 
understanding of the intricate, Pater- 
esque tendency in recent life and letters. 
Perhaps not every schoolboy knows 
that Cyrenaicism was a system of thought 
and conduct bred in the mind of Aristip- 
pus of Cyrene. This person, who was a 
[103] 



WALTER PATER 

contemporary of Socrates, held that all 
knowledge is relative to the perceiving 
mind, that we can never really know the 
thing in itself, that, since this is the case, 
the chief end of life should be the pursuit 
of high intellectual pleasure or well-being 
in an enduring state of contentment. A 
follower of Aristippus, one Euhemerus, 
developed his system into a very ration- 
alistic philosophy of religion; another, 
Hegesias, developed it into a kind of ideal 
pessimism, as Schopenhauer and Leopardi 
did later. Hegesias became known by 
the appellation of "Persuader-to-Death," 
from the disconcerting fact that his class 
in philosophy was more than decimated 
by suicide of its members. But in the 
thought of its founder the Cyrenaic sys- 
[104] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

tem had greater affinities with idealism 
of the more buoyant sort, and, as a mat- 
ter of fact, Aristippus before he died 
became practically a member of the So- 
cratic school. All these tendencies in or- 
der were exemplified in the course taken 
by the Cyrenaicism of Walter Pater. 

As we have seen, there were always 
traceable in him two conflicting mental 
dispositions. There was an abstracting, 
idealising, centripetal motive, tending to 
Puritanism or Pantheism in religion, 
counterbalanced by a more materialistic 
centrifugal force that found its natural 
religious affinities in very diverse quar- 
ters, in polytheistic Paganism, in Catholi- 
cism, or even in agnosticism. But while 
these tendencies may be distinguished by 
[105] 



WALTER PATER 

a theoretical analysis, practically they 
were merged into indivisible, inalienable 
unity by the fusing power of personality. 
In his younger days he was, like Marius, 
"a materialist with something of the tem- 
per of a devotee." 

But this twy-formed temperament, 
nourished on curious philosophic studies, 
led him into scepticism. The chief con- 
tention of the " Conclusion" to "The Re- 
naissance" is that old one of the vanity 
of dogmatising. After much preoccupa- 
tion with the divisions of the sensible and 
the intelligible worlds, with the opposition 
of relative and absolute truth, he is led at 
last to distrust even that measure of abso- 
lute truth which may be asserted to be 
inherent in the very constitution of mind 
[106] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

as mind. Of late the extension of psy- 
chology and the rise of the philosophic 
movement, which has taken for its watch- 
word "Back to Kant!" has made a belief 
in this measure of universality tolerably 
easy. But in the sixties and early seven- 
ties, when Darwinism, still imperfectly 
understood, had all the romantic charm of 
a new cosmic theory, when Mill and Hux^ 
ley were in their prime and German ideal- 
ism had fallen into its dotage, avoidance 
of this sort of philosophic scepticism was 
a more difficult matter — practically im- 
possible for those temperamentally in- 
clined toward it. Pater at the time of 
writing the "Renaissance" did not avoid 
it. He fell to pondering upon the eternal 
flux of things, until not Heraclitus him- 
[107] 



WALTER PATER 

self could have expressed the shorelessness 
of the strange seas of thought more strik- 
ingly. In the "Conclusion" he writes: 

"Or if we begin with the inward world 
of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is 
still more rapid, the flame more eager and 
devouring. There it is no longer the 
gradual darkening of the eye and fading 
of colour from the wall — the movement 
of the shore-side, where the water flows 
down indeed, though in apparent rest — 
but the race of the mid-stream, a drift of 
momentary acts of sight and passion and 
thought. At first sight, experience seems 
to bury us under a flood of external ob- 
jects, pressing upon us with a sharp and 
importunate reality, calling us out of our- 
selves in a thousand forms of action. But 
[108] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

when reflection begins to act upon those 
objects they are dissipated under its in- 
fluence; the cohesive force seems sus- 
pended like a trick of magic; each object 
is loosed into a group of impressions — 
colour, odour, texture — in the mind of the 
observer. And if we continue to dwell in 
thought on this world, not of objects in 
the solidity with which language invests 
them, but of impressions, unstable, flick- 
ering, inconsistent, which burn and are 
extinguished with our consciousness of 
them, it contracts still further; the whole 
scope of observation is dwarfed to the 
narrow chamber of the individual mind. 
Experience, already reduced to a swarm 
of impressions, is ringed round for each 
of us by that thick wall of personality, 
[109] 



WALTER PATER 

through which no real voice has ever 
pierced on its way to us, or from us to 
that which we can only conjecture to be 
without. Every one of those impressions 
is the impression of the individual in his 
isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary 
prisoner its own dream of a world. Anal- 
ysis goes a step further still, and assures 
us that those impressions of the individual 
mind to which, for each one of us, experi- 
ence dwindles down, are in perpetual 
flight; that each of them is limited by 
time, and that as time is infinitely divis- 
ible, each of them is infinitely divisible 
also ; all that is actual in it, being a single 
moment, gone while we try to apprehend 
it, of which it may ever be more truly said 
that it has ceased to be than that it is. To 
[110] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

such a tremulous wisp constantly reform- 
ing itself on the stream, to a single sharp 
impression, with a sense in it, a relic more 
or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, 
what is real in our life fines itself down. 
It is with this movement, with the passage 
and dissolution of impressions, images, 
sensations, that analysis leaves off — that 
continual vanishing away, that strange, 
perpetual weaving and unweaving of our- 
selves." 

It must be confessed that the first effect 
of such a passage as this is but to produce 
a disturbing sense of the shiftiness of 
thought. It seems the expression of a 
"weird seizure," like those to which the 
young prince in Tennyson was unfortu- 
nately subject, or those which befall the 

[in] 



WALTER PATER 

sensitive reader of Calderon's "Life is a 
Dream." It is pretty certain that in stat- 
ing the case for scepticism Pater has bent 
the stick, in his efforts to straighten it, too 
much the other way. But at any rate it 
was by such considerations as these that 
he came to distrust all dogmatisms. The 
choice of a philosophy, he says, is a mat- 
ter of temperament, and the service of it, 
he adds, quoting Novalis, is simply to 
vivify and dephlegmatise our stolid and 
self-satisfied minds. As he said: 

"Philosophy serves culture not by the 
fancied gift of absolute or transcendental 
knowledge, but by suggesting questions 
which help one to detect the passion and 
strangeness and dramatic contrasts of 
life." So he fell into a liking for all phil- 
[112] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

osophies, in so far as they were poetic or 
suggestive. Idealism, materialism, stoi- 
cism, epicureanism, all, somewhere, re- 
ceived luminous exposition at his hands. 
But upon none of them could he heartily 
bestow his allegiance. His own sympathy 
lay with the reserved judgment of Soc- 
rates and Montaigne. 

Most moralising sceptics in philosophy 
have made the end of their scepticism 
the attainment of "ataraxia," or a genial, 
untroubled equanimity. This was not 
the end which Pater proposed to him- 
self. Neither was he, even in his younger 
days, precisely of the Cyrenaic school of 
such men as Pepys and Beckford and 
Temple, who, esteeming human life as 
but a "froward child," would soothe and 
[113] 



WALTER PATER 

cozen it with toys and pretty games until 
it fall asleep. Neither was he of those 
who sport considerably with Amaryllis in 
the shade, and still less, even in his "warm 
blood and canicular days," was he of those 
who follow in the train of Lais. This was 
"the lower Cyrenaicism" perennial in all 
ages ; his should be higher. If for him the 
eye must be the determining influence in 
life, he must strive to be of the number 
of those "made perfect by the love of 
visible beauty/ ' 

This, however, was the result of a slow- 
ly ripening growth. If we compare the 
doctrines of the "Renaissance" with those 
of "Marius" we shall discover a signifi- 
cant evolution. In the earlier volume, 
where he is concerned with the pomp and 
[114] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 
glory of the Italian Renaissance, its de- 
votion to sensuous beauty and poetic pas- 
sions, his position is nearer to what men 
have understood by Hedonism. The su- 
preme question of life, he thinks then, is, 
"How shall we pass most swiftly from 
point to point, and be present always at 
the focus where the greatest number of 
vital forces unite in their purest energy?" 
"To burn always," he says, "with this 
hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this 
ecstasy is success in lif e. . . . While all 
melts beneath our feet we may well catch 
at any exquisite passion, or any contribu- 
tion to knowledge that seems by a lifted 
horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, 
or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, 
strange colours, and curious odours, or the 
[115] 



WALTER PATER 

work of the artist's hand, or the face of 
one's friend. Not to discriminate every 
moment some passionate attitude in those 
about us, and in the brilliancy of their 
gifts, some tragic dividing of forces on 
their ways, is, on this short day of frost 
and sun, to sleep before evening." 

It will be seen that the ideal life shad- 
owed forth in such sentences could never 
be the life of the jaded, Sybaritic person 
or of the vague-eyed aesthete, sometimes 
thought to belong to the school of Pater. 
It is, rather, the peculiar ideal of the 
ardent yet fastidious young man whose 
receptive powers have ripened early; such 
a young man, for example, as Goethe was 
upon a time, or Browning. But, as actu- 
ally in the case of Goethe, so theoretically 
[116] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 
in the case of Pater, all this was liable to 
serious objection on the ground of its 
tendency. There was small place in this 
ethical scheme for any restraining or in- 
hibitive force; and, on the other hand, 
provided the person were listless in mind 
or morbid in body, it contained but scant 
incentive to any high, self -forgetful en- 
deavour.* 

* He is a graceless biographer who quotes from parodies 
upon the work of his author, but perhaps a sentence from 
Mr. Mallock's mockery may help to distinguish more clearly 
the misconception which Pater suffered in the thoughts of 
many — a misconception not unallied to a real weakness in 
his teaching : "The end of life," says Mr. Rose, in a voice 
like a lonely flute, " is the consciousness of exquisite living 
— in the making our own each highest thrill of joy that the 
moment offers us — be it some touch of colour on the sea or 
on the mountains, the early dew in the crimson shadows 
of a rose, or the shining of a woman's limbs in clear 
water — " He is interrupted by some confusion among the 
ladies. 

[117] 



WALTER PATER 

This Pater seems to have felt and set 
himself to correct. Normally, of course, 
we have no right to confuse the sentiments 
of the creative artist with those which he 
puts into the mouth of his creature; but 
with Pater and Marius the case is some- 
what exceptional. In the whole manner 
and method of its composition "Marius" 
is an exposition and defence of a mode of 
life which not only stirred the author's 
deepest interest and sympathy, but, as we 
know from the circumstances of his own 
career, was an actual and effective ideal 
to him. By the time Pater set himself to 
the writing of "Marius" the natural 
ripening of his mind had so widened the 
theory that it bears a very different face. 
He has begun to care a little less for the 
[118] 



'THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

splendours of the Renaissance, and more 
for his first love, the chaster beauties of 
Hellenic life and art. In the "Renais- 
sance" he might have seemed almost the 
orator of luxurious wealth; a strange 
apostasy for one who set out as a disciple 
of Ruskin! But now all this is changed, 
subdued, refined. The Greek spirit, with 
its engaging naturalness, simple and de- 
bonair, is now more clearly for him "the 
Sangrael of an endless pilgrimage." 

If the aesthetic morality of the "Re- 
naissance" might almost have found its 
arch-saint in such a person as Benvenuto 
Cellini of pious memory, we see in "Ma- 
rius" how all systems of morality, in the 
practice of their wisest exponents, come 
together toward one ideal of the perfect 
[119] 



WALTER PATER 

life. Marius, it is explicitly stated, makes 
not pleasure, but fulness of life his aim 
and end. Furthermore, the emphasis here 
is shifted to rest upon austerer and more 
elevated things. The chief pursuit of 
Marius is "the art of so relieving the ideal 
or poetic traits, the elements of distinc- 
tion in our daily life — of so exclusively 
living with them — that the unadorned re- 
mainder of it, the drift or debris of our 
day, comes to be as though it were not." 
He cares most now for the poetic beauty 
of clear thought, "the actually aesthetic 
charm of a cold austerity of mind." He 
sees that this manner of life might come 
to be in itself a kind of mystic piety, or 
religion, that it would demand "energy, 
variety, and choice of experience, includ- 
[120] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

ing noble pain and sorrow even, loves 
such as those in the exquisite old story of 
Apuleius, sincere and strenuous forms of 
the moral life such as Seneca and Epic- 
tetus — whatever form of human life, in 
short, might be heroic, impassioned, 
ideal." Finally, he felt that this mode of 
life would exclude much dalliance with 
the lighter joys of "settled, sweet epicu- 
rean life," for it would mean such a life 
as that which we have seen Pater living in 
his Oxford chambers, "a life of sober in- 
dustry, of industrious study, only possible 
through healthy rule keeping clear the 
eye alike of body and soul." 

With such an ideal actually and dy- 
namically present in his mind, Marius 
speedily arrived at the idea of responsi- 
[121] 



WALTER PATER 

bility. His mode of life was enjoined 
upon him by a sense of duty, by a "cate- 
gorical imperative" almost, "to offend 
against which brought with it a strange 
feeling of disloyalty as to a person." 
With this sense of obligation firm within 
him, pagan Marius came to the last stage 
in the philosophic pilgrimage. His deep 
and sombre meditation upon the variety 
of the world, the inwardness and grief of 
life, finally conducted him, by the beaten 
path of experience, to a kind of human 
idealism, with its roots struck deep into 
the general heart of the race. Like that 
other sceptic Hume, Marius — and Pater 
with him — came to find the essence and 
reality of life in sympathy. Only with 
Pater this mood attained a kind of tran- 
[ 122] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

scendental elevation and import. In the 
chapter upon "The Will as Vision" he 
subscribes to the old belief of the mystics, 
now upheld by many thinkers of diverse 
sorts, Kantian philosophers, orthodox re- 
ligionists, experimental psychologists, that 
after all the will to believe is the whole 
matter. 

This is the sum of Pater's Cyrenaic 
philosophy of life. Its plea was for a 
system of morals as living and flexible as 
life itself, and for a recognition of the 
importance of "being" as well as "doing." 
Such considerations have perennial value, 
but especial significance in an age like 
ours when it is so fatally easy to glorify 
over much great aggregations of horse- 
power, men of high voltage, and the 
[ 123 ] ; 



WALTER PATER 

efficient life. But here again one must 
guard against extremes. Cyrenaicism, in 
turn, needs the correction of the Gospel 
of Work which Carlyle preached so ton- 
ically. Tristem neminem fecit may in- 
deed be said at the last of each modern 
Marius, but can one always add, "He was 
a labourer worthy of his hire"? 

If we shift our point of view a little, 
and, instead of contemplating the new 
Cyrenaicism in its philosophic and ethical 
aspects, consider its religious implica- 
tions, we shall discover some significant 
facts. 

As, in philosophy, Pater progressed 

from scepticism to an idealism rooted in 

experience, so in religion he moved from 

virtual paganism toward practical Chris- 

[124] 



'THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

tianity. In the "Renaissance" he values 
all religions, Paganism, Catholicism, 
Protestant Christianity, as he values all 
philosophies, chiefly for the romantic ele- 
ments of strangeness, beauty, or passion 
in them. Like that earlier Cyrenaic Eu- 
hemerus, he has his own philosophy of 
religion. He has tarried with German 
rationalists and French biographers of 
Jesus. He considers all religions as 
stages in the inexhaustible activity and 
creativeness of the human mind, "in which 
all religions alike have their root and in 
which all are reconciled, just as the fancies 
of childhood and the thoughts of old age 
meet and are laid at rest in the personality 
of the individual." And through them 
all, as Pater sees it, runs the warp of 
[ 125] 



WALTER PATER 

Paganism. In the essay on Winckel- 
mann he writes: 

"Still, the broad foundation in mere 
human nature of all religions as they 
exist for the greatest number is a univer- 
sal pagan sentiment, a paganism which 
existed before the Greek religion, and has 
lingered far onward into the Christian 
world, ineradicable, like some persistent 
vegetable growth, because its seed is an 
element of the very soil out of which it 
springs. This pagan sentiment measures 
the sadness with which the human mind is 
filled, whenever its thoughts wander far 
from what is here and now. It is beset by 
notions of irresistible natural powers, for 
the most part ranged against man, but the 
secret also of his fortune, making the 
[126] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

earth golden and the grape fiery for him. 
He makes gods in his own image, gods 
smiling and flower-crowned or bleeding 
by some sad fatality, to console him by 
their wounds, never closed from genera- 
tion to generation. It is with a rush of 
home-sickness that the thought of death 
presents itself. He would remain at 
home forever on the earth if he could; as 
it loses its colour and the senses fail, he 
clings ever closer to it; but since the 
mouldering of bones and flesh must go on 
to the end, he is careful for charms and 
talismans, that may chance to have some 
friendly power in them, when the inevi- 
table shipwreck comes. Such sentiment is 
a part of the eternal basis of all religions, 
modified, indeed, by changes of time and 
[127] 



WALTER PATER 

place, but indestructible, because its root 
is so deep in the earth of man's nature. 
. . . This pagan worship, in spite of 
local variations, essentially one, is an ele- 
ment in all religions. It is the anodyne 
which the religious principle, like one ad- 
ministering opiates to the incurable, has 
added to the law which makes life sombre 
for the vast majority of mankind." 

But notwithstanding this very modern 
comprehensiveness, Pater always pos- 
sessed a lively sympathy with ecclesias- 
tical tradition, and he felt especially "the 
soothing influence which the Roman 
Church has often exerted over spirits too 
independent to be its subjects." We have 
seen how early he developed a love for its 
ritualistic observances; and in his last 
[128] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

essay — on Pascal, a significant theme — 
he recurs to the well-worn path again. 
"Multitudes," he says, "in every genera- 
tion have felt at least the aesthetic charm 
of the rites of the Catholic Church. For 
Pascal, on the other hand, a certain puer- 
ility, a certain unprofitableness in them 
is but an extra trial of faith." 

In spite of his rationalising tendency, 
in spite of his profuse sympathies, Pater, 
like almost all English men of letters who 
have not died young, tended as he grew 
older toward conservatism and a trust in 
the Establishment. Many of his friends, 
indeed, think that had he lived but a little 
longer he would have taken orders, sought 
some quiet country living, and so spent 
the remnant of his days in the odour of 
[129] 



WALTER PATER 

traditional piety. However that may be, 
it is certain that in all his work after 
"Marius" there is a strain of feeling quite 
other than the fluid religious scepticism of 
his youth. He still believes in the useful- 
ness of a frequent purgation of narrow 
religious sentiment to promote "a kind 
of cheerful daylight in men's tempers"; 
but his recognition of the profound mys- 
tery of personality eternally underlying 
those draughts of intellectual day gives 
all his later thought a certain mystical 
and religious colouring. 

But, more than that, his thought is now 
distinctively Christian, though his specific 
position is still obviously latitudinarian. 
It is not unlike that of such men as Mar- 
tineau, but with a slightly greater sympa- 
[130] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

thy for all that is meant by the historic 
development of the Church. It is not un- 
like the attitude of Tennyson — of the 
anima naturaliter Christiana everywhere 
— stretching lame hands of faith and 
faintly trusting the larger hope. Here 
again we may let him speak for himself. 
In the review of "Robert Elsmere" he 
writes of certain theological problems 
with unusual candour and simplicity. In 
a passage which, in view of all the facts, 
has a clear autobiographic ring, he says: 
"Robert Elsmere was a type of a large 
class of minds who cannot be sure that the 
sacred story is true. It is philosophical, 
doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to 
recognise our doubts, to locate them, per- 
haps to give them practical effect. It 
[131] 



WALTER PATER 

may be also a moral duty to do this. But 
then there is also a large class of minds 
which cannot be sure it is false — minds of 
very various degrees of conscientiousness 
and intellectual power, up to the highest. 
They will think those who are quite sure 
it is false unphilosophical through lack of 
doubt. For their part they make allow- 
ance in their scheme of life for a great 
possibility, and with some of them that 
bare concession of possibility (the subject 
of it being what it is) becomes the most 
important fact in the world. The recog- 
nition of it straightway opens wide the 
door to hope and love; and such persons 
are, as we fancy they always will be, the 
nucleus of a church. Their particular 
phase of doubt, of philosophic uncertain- 
[ 132] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 

ty, has been the secret of millions of good 
Christians, multitudes of worthy priests." 
In such passages as this we see the pe- 
rennial justification of that Cyrenaicism 
so dear to the genial heart of youth; we 
see that the devoted and whole-hearted 
quest of beauty, provided it be truly de- 
voted and whole-hearted, may not lead 
one far astray from the good ; and, finally, 
we see that often nowadays, as in the old 
transitional times, "the true preparation 
for the gospel is in the lives of such as 
M arius." Had "Gaston de Latour" been 
completed we should have had a confes- 
sion of faith even more impressive and 
convincing. That stately fragment would 
have shown how at the end Christianity 
may prevail not only over such a pagan- 
[133 ] 



WALTER PATER 

ism as Marius was bred in, but even over 
a scepticism so stubborn and elusive as 
Montaigne's. Quite in accord with all 
this is the testimony of the friend who 
preached the memorial sermon from which 
I have already quoted: 

"His whole life seemed to me to be the 
gradual consecration of an exquisite sense 
of beauty to the highest ends; an almost 
literally exact advance through the stages 
of admiration in the Symposium, till at 
last he reached the sure haven, the One 
Source of all that is fair and good." All 
of which is bound together into the unity 
of imaginative insight in the ultimate 
poem of unhappy Lionel Johnson, one of 
the truest of Pater's student friends: 

[134] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 
WALTER PATER 
Gracious God rest him, he who toiled so well 

Secrets of grace to tell 
Graciously; as the awed rejoicing priest 

Officiates at the feast, 
Knowing, how deep within the liturgies 

Lie hid the mysteries. 
Half of a passionately pensive soul 

He showed us, not the whole; 
Who loved him best, they best, they only, knew 

The deeps, they might not view; 
That, which was private between God and him; 

To others, justly dim. 
Calm Oxford autumns and preluding springs! 

To me your memory brings 
Delight upon delight, but chief est one; 

The thought of Oxford's son, 
Who gave me of his welcome and his praise, 

When white were still my days; 
[135] 



WALTER PATER 

Ere death had left life darkling, nor had sent 

Lament upon lament : 
Ere sorrow told me, how I loved my lost, 

And bade me base love's cost. 
Scholarship's constant saint, he kept her light 

In him divinely white; 
With cloistral jealousness of ardour strove 

To guard her sacred grove, 
Inviolate by unworldly feet, nor paced 

In desecrating haste. 
Oh, sweet grove smiling of that wisdom, brought 

From arduous ways of thought; 
Oh, golden patience of that travailing soul, 

So hungered for the goal, 
And vowed to keep, through subtly vigilant pain, 

From pastime on the plain; 
Enamoured of the difficult mountain air 

Up beauty's Hill of Prayer! 
[136] 



"THE NEW CYRENAICISM" 
Stern is the faith of art, right stern, and he 

Loved her severity. 
Momentous things he prised, gradual and fair, 

Births of passionate air: 
Some austere setting of an ancient sun, 

Its midday glories done, 
Over a silent melancholy sea 

In sad serenity: 
Some delicate dawning of a new desire, 

Distilling fragrant fire 
On hearts of men prophetically fain 

To feel earth young again: 
Some strange rich passage of the dreaming earth, 

Fulfilled with warmth and worth. 
Ended, his services: yet, albeit, farewell 

Tolls the faint vesper bell, 
Patient beneath his Oxford trees and towers 

He still is gently ours: 
[137] 



WALTER PATER 

Hierarch of the spirit, pure and strong, 

Worthy Uranian song. 
Gracious God keep him: and God grant to me 

By miracle to see 
That unforgettably most gracious friend, 

In the never-ending end. 



[138] 



VI 

LAST YEARS 
In 1891 and 1892 Pater delivered at 
Oxford, to young students of philosophy 
there, a course of lectures upon the Aca- 
demic philosophy. The following year 
these were printed in a single volume un- 
under the title "Plato and Platonism." 
More than any other of his books this ex- 
hibits the excellence of his scholarship, 
and the rich strength of his intellectual 
powers, at their ripest period, employed 
in the scholarly vitalisation of a difficult 
theme. The Platonic philosophy, con- 
ceived not as a system, but as a group of 
tendencies, is outlined against a back- 
ground of Greek life, realised in all his- 
toric and humane aspects and poetic 
[139] 



WALTER PATER 

phases. The genesis of these tendencies 
out of the earlier systems of Pythagoras, 
Heraclitus, and the Eleatics is traced with 
remarkable insight, yet with equally re- 
markable sanity and moderation. Plato's 
own temperament, the furnishing of his 
mind, his intricate relation to Socrates, 
are all portrayed with that singularly in- 
timate interpretative power which we 
have seen as the chief trait of Pater's 
prose. In form, in the carefully consid- 
ered unity in variety of its structure, in 
the unusually self-denying yet exquisitely 
wrought style, it is perhaps the most 
thoroughly satisfactory of all his works. 
Jowett himself was among the first to ex- 
press to Pater his profound admiration 
for the learning and insight displayed in 
[140] 



LAST YEARS 

the book, and to tender his congratula- 
tions upon its publication. 

In 1893 Pater gave up the house at 
Kensington and took his household goods 
and gods back to Oxford. He has often 
been described as he appeared at this time. 
He is pictured as "a man of medium 
height, rather heavily built, with a pecu- 
liar though slight stoop. His face was 
pale, and perhaps a dark and very thick 
moustache made it seem even more so." 
His expression is said to have had in re- 
pose a singular impassiveness, like that 
of "a Bismarck turned dreamer." But 
in spite of this impassiveness he was a 
wonderfully winsome companion to his 
friends. As is the wont of the Dutch 
countenance, his face never lost a certain 
[141] 



WALTER PATER 

pleasing youthfulness. His manners, 
though reserved, were simple and kindly, 
and often playful. He intensely disliked 
all noise and extravagance; and his own 
voice, as all who knew him agree, was low 
and musical. He was a serene compan- 
ion, and people liked to be with him. Yet 
he never married. One wonders a little, 
as he wondered at Pascal's single state, 
"Was it mere oddity of genius? Or was 
it the last fine, dainty touch of difference 
from ordinary people and their motives?" 
But it was not for him to enjoy much 
longer the academic life that he loved, or 
to taste deeper of the joy of his grow- 
ing fame and influence. In July, 1894, 
he fell sick of a rheumatic fever. It was 
not thought to be serious ; ere long he be- 
[142] 



LAST YEARS 

came convalescent and was permitted to 
sit up and look out upon the world of his 
delight. Then, suddenly, came a quick 
relapse, and he died on July 30, 1894. 
He was in the fifty-fifth year of his life, 
yet it seemed like the death of a young 
man. 

It is evident that the life we have passed 
in review was like that of Gray, intrin- 
sically an academic product. But, more 
than Gray, Pater "spoke out." Like the 
earlier scholar he was a little indolent, 
and, perhaps, rather too much disposed to 
care for the suavities of life; but his hu- 
manism meant too much to him, his sense 
of the burden of a message was too keen 
to let him be content with a meagre 
[143] 



WALTER PATER 

product. There was a fine health and 
sanity in his life, yet he was much of the 
dreamer withal; he had something of the 
"inward tacitness of mind" of the born 
mystic, united to a wistful and humor- 
some eagerness to know and experience 
everything. Hence, while his bodily self 
remained for the most part, like Mon- 
taigne's, with seeming indolence at home, 
his mind was bent toward a continual ob- 
servation of new and unknown things, 

Come gente che pensa suo cammino, 
Che va col core, e col corpo dimora: 

Like Virgil and like Kant, he is one of 
the striking examples of the power of the 
mind to transcend space and time and 
[ 144] 



LAST YEARS 

make a home-staying man a citizen of the 
world. As Kant at Konigsberg wrote 
his marvellously exact accounts of the 
South Sea Islanders, so Pater at Oxford 
revisited the Lacedsemonian state. 

Now to a man of this sensitive and re- 
ceptive humour, his cloistered life, relieved 
by social amenities, but not broken by 
affairs, had manifest advantages. It af- 
forded opportunity for the clarification 
and generalisation of his intimations of 
humanity; it reinforced them and gave 
them precision and breadth by carefully 
cultivated scholarship. He cared, too, for 
other things beside reading and study. 
We must not forget that "lust of the eye" 
in him, so desirous of beauty. He cared, 
perhaps not always wisely, for all strong 
[145] 



WALTER PATER 

impressions from art and nature, for all 
that is beautiful, or strange, or vivid — for 
pretty coins, for tales of adventure and 
hair-breadth escape — and for the sudden 
intimacies of friendship. But this absorb- 
ing power of the true humanistic tem- 
perament made him the heir of the sorrow 
of the world as well as of its beauty and 
joy- "Variety of affection in a household 
in which many relations had lived to- 
gether had brought variety of sorrow." 
So, in his work, by a kind of pervading 
insinuation, he makes one taste the springs 
of tears in the very nature of things. 
But why strive to refine our impression? 

Ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago. 

His personality was of the sort that is 
[146] 



LAST YEARS 

best felt in the style of his work, better 
portrayed by analogy and distinction 
than by definition. He was an idealist, 
yet not of the spiritual family of Sidney 
and Shelley; he lacked their youthful en- 
thusiasm and exuberance; and he was far 
too sophisticate to embrace with passion 
the first fair Vision of Truth that crossed 
his path. He was never, like them, doc- 
trinaire. He was, also, too full a man to 
fall into the rough and ready generalis- 
ing which is the most frequent cause of 
popularity, as it is of cock-sureness and 
energy in style. Nor was he, precisely, of 
the school of Coleridge. He held, rather 
oddly, that Coleridge took himself and 
the world quite too seriously, and would 
have been benefited by a touch of gently 
[147] 



WALTER PATER 

humourous unconcern. In spite of his 
sense of duty, his friendships, his pity, his 
ardent humanism, one always feels under- 
lying Pater's work, as it underlies Da 
Vinci's secular masterpiece, something of 
this gently humourous unconcern. He 
saw the burden of the mystery with a sad 
lucidity of view. Instead of being pas- 
sionately disturbed by it, he was pleas- 
antly interested as he sat at ease in his 
ivory tower. He possessed a large por- 
tion of that modernity which finds its 
highest cause for rejoicing in that "the 
world is so full of a number of things," 
and he shared in the subtilely optimistic 
view of evil, that properly to understand 
all is to forgive all — tout comprendre 
c'est tout pardonner. So he came, one 
[148] 



LAST YEARS 

thinks, like the object of one of his own 
characterisations, to "a kind of moral sex- 
lessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffec- 
tual wholeness of nature, yet with a true 
beauty and significance of its own." 

He has never been in any sense a popu- 
lar writer. That numerous monstrosity, 
the novel-reading public, has never dis- 
covered him. The well-meaning persons 
who, like the gay boy in Stevenson, find 
in the Aihenceum only "the most awful 
swipes about poetry and the use of 
globes," if they attempt Pater at all, find 
him uncongenial and difficult to under- 
stand. In a sense he is a writer's writer, 
still there are some even among the elect 
of letters who have a distaste for what 
they term his "pulpy" periods, "his lack 
[149] 



WALTER PATER 

of virility and paucity of ideas." "More 
matter and less art!" has been the critics' 
cry. Yet if this essay has been in any 
degree successful in apprehending the 
peculiar individuality of his work it 
should be clear that such objections are 
beside the mark. Precisely such writing 
as his, so exquisitely modulated, so infi- 
nitely expressive, has I know not what 
cloistral value in this insistent worldly 
present. It is this in him which has won 
him his potent influence over the minds of 
young persons of a certain type. There 
are critics who have sometimes seen in him 
the inspiration of a school of sentimental- 
ists and stylists now much with us. This 
is a perverse judgment, for the most 
typical men of this set have much more 
[150] 



LAST YEARS 

in common with De Quincey's tradition 
in prose than they have with Pater's, 
while many of them prefer a stiff, mere- 
tricious brocade to the softer colour and 
sinuous folds of our author's garment of 
style. It is indeed true that many young 
writers who aspire to write scholarly, ex- 
pressive English, are diligently studying 
Pater, just as they study Stevenson and 
Newman and Addison and the earlier and 
more robust masters; and in a Taylorian 
lecture at Oxford the French stylist 
Bourget gave eloquent expression to the 
obligation of French writers to the 
"parfait prosateur" But his real school, 
if he has such a thing, is to be found 
among those who have read him not as a 
stylist, but as a scholar and humanist, who 
[151] 



WALTER PATER 
have responded to his interest in some 
field of their own labour or delight. And 
among these there is small trace of the 
eff eminacy, uneasy self -consciousness, and 
weariness of life which are the marks of 
those pseudo-Paterians whom some have 
thought to be his true followers. 

The final merit of Pater's work is its 
admirable educative and refining tend- 
ency. While one may fail to agree with 
this or that opinion, or may tire of the 
subtile, intensive style, he who will ap- 
proach him sympathetically may sweeten 
the day by the reading, and be sure of 
taking from his pages a lively sense of 
the fulness and colour of the world, and 
a fresh impulse to a gracefully ordered, 
thoughtful life. 

[152] 



CHRONOLOGY 

1839 
Walter Pater is born. 

1853 
Goes to King's School in Canterbury. 

1858 
Matriculates at Queen's College, Oxford. 

1862 
Graduates B. A. and becomes a private tutor. 

1864 
Proceeds M. A. and is elected Fellow of Brase- 
nose College. 

1865 
Visits Italy for the first time. 

1866 
"Coleridge/' appeared in the Westminster Re- 
view, January; reprinted in "Appreciations," 1889. 

1867 
"Winckelmann," appeared in the Westminster 
Review, January; reprinted in "Studies in the 
Renaissance/' 1873. 

1868 
"^Esthetic Poetry/' written, first published in 
"Appreciations," 1889- 

[153] 



WALTER PATER 

1869 
"Notes on Leonardo da Vinci," appeared in 
Fortnightly Review, November; reprinted in 
"Studies in the Renaissance/' 1873. 

1870 
"Sandro Botticelli," appeared in Fortnightly Re- 
view, October; reprinted in "Studies in the Renais- 
sance/' 1873. 

1871 

"Pico della Mirandola," appeared in Fortnightly 
Review, October; reprinted in "Studies in the 
Renaissance/' 1873. 

"Poetry of Michelangelo," appeared in Fort- 
nightly Review, November; reprinted in "Studies 
in the Renaissance/' 1873. 

1873 
"Studies in the History of the Renaissance/' 
published by Messrs. Macmillan, contained in ad- 
dition to the essays already mentioned, studies of 
"Aucassin and Nicolette" (in later editions entitled 
"Two Early French Stories"), "Luca della Rob- 
bia," "Joachim du Bellay/' and a "Conclusion." 
[154] 



CHRONOLOGY 

1874 
"Wordsworth/' appeared in Fortnightly Review, 
April; "Measure for Measure/' appeared in Fort- 
nightly Review, November; both reprinted in "Ap- 
preciations/' 1889. 

1875 

Review of "Symonds' Renaissance in Italy, the 
Age of the Despots/' Academy, July 31. 

"Demeter and Persephone/' delivered as lectures 
at the Birmingham and Midland Institute, ap- 
peared in the Fortnightly Review, January and 
February, 1876; reprinted in "Greek Studies/' 
1895. 

1876 

"Romanticism," appeared in Macmillan's Maga- 
zine, November; reprinted as "Postscript" in "Ap- 
preciations," 1889. 

"A Study of Dionysus," appeared in Fortnightly 
Review, December; reprinted in "Greek Studies," 
1895. 

1877 
"The School of Giorgione," appeared in Fort- 
nightly Review, October; reprinted in third edi- 
tion of "The Renaissance," 1888. 
[155] 



WALTER PATER 

"The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry/' 
second edition. "Conclusion" omitted. 

1878 

"The Child in the House/' appeared in Mac- 
millan's Magazine, August; reprinted, privately, 
by Mr. H. Daniel, 1894, and in "Miscellaneous 
Studies/' 1895. 

"Charles Lamb," appeared in Fortnightly Re- 
view, October; reprinted in "Appreciations," 1889. 

"Love's Labour's Lost," written; appeared in 
Macmillan's Magazine, December, 1885; reprinted 
in "Appreciations," 1889. 

"The Bacchanals of Euripides," written; ap- 
peared in Macmillan's Magazine, May, 1889; re- 
printed in Tyrrell's edition of the "Bacchae," 1892; 
reprinted in "Greek Studies," 1895. 

1880 
"The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture," appeared 
in Fortnightly Review, February and March; re- 
printed in "Greek Studies," 1895. 

"The Marbles of iEgina/' appeared in Fort- 
nightly Review, April; reprinted in "Greek 
Studies," 1895. 

[156] 



CHRONOLOGY 

1881 
Pater begins the composition of "Marius." 

1882 
He spends the winter in Rome. 

1883 
"Dante Gabriel Rossetti/' written; appeared in 
"Appreciations/' 1889. 

1885 

"Marius the Epicurean/' published by Messrs. 
Macmillan. 

"A Prince of Court Painters/' appeared in Mac- 
millan's Magazine, October; reprinted in "Imagi- 
nary Portraits/' 1887. 

1886 

Pater removes his household to Kensington. 

Reviews "Four Books for Students of English 
Literature/' Guardian, February 17; reprinted in 
"Essays from the Guardian/' 1896. 

Reviews "Amiel's Journal Intime/' Guardian, 
March 17; reprinted in "Essays from the Guard- 
ian/' 1896. 

"Feuillet's 'La Morte/ " written; published in 
second edition of "Appreciations/' 1890. 
[157] 



WALTER PATER 

"'Sir Thomas Browne/' written; published in 
"Appreciations/' 1889- 

"Sebastian Van Storck/' appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine, March; reprinted in "Imaginary Por- 
traits/' 1887. 

"Denys L'Auxerrois/' appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine, October; reprinted in "Imaginary Por- 
traits/' 1887. 

1887 

Reviews "Symons' An Introduction to the Study 
of Browning/' Guardian, November 9; reprinted in 
"Essays from the Guardian/' 1896. 

Reviews "Lemaitre's Serenus and other Tales," 
in Macmillan's Magazine, November. 

"Duke Carl of Rosenmold/' appeared in Mac- 
millan's Magazine, May; reprinted in "Imaginary 
Portraits," published by Messrs. Macmillan. 

1888 
Reviews "Robert Elsmere/' Guardian, March 28. 
Reviews "Doran's Annals of the English Stage/' 
Guardian, June 27; both reprinted in "Essays from 
the Guardian/' 1896. 

Reviews "Life and Letters of Flaubert/' Pall 
Mall Gazette, August 25. 

[158] 



CHRONOLOGY 

"Gaston de Latour," first five chapters appeared 
in Macmillan's Magazine, from June to October; 
reprinted in 1896. 

"Style," appeared in Fortnightly Review, De- 
cember; reprinted in "Appreciations/' 1889- 

"The Renaissance," third edition, published by 
Messrs. Macmillan, with the "Conclusion" revised 
and reinstated. 

1889 

Reviews "The Complete Poetical Works of 
Wordsworth," ed. J. Morley, Athenaeum, Janu- 
ary 26. 

Reviews three editions of "Wordsworth," Guard- 
ian, February 27. 

Reviews "Fabre's Norine," Guardian, June 12; 
both reprinted in "Essays from the Guardian/' 
1896. 

Reviews "Correspondence de Gustave Flaubert/' 

Athen&um, August 3. 

Reviews "Fabre's Toussaint Galabru," Nine- 
ty 

teenth Century, April. 

Reviews "Symons' Days and Nights," Pall Mall 
Gazette, March 23. 

Reviews "It Is Thyself/' Pall Mall Gazette, 
April 15. 

[159] 



WALTER PATER 

"Hippolytus Veiled/' appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine, August; reprinted in "Greek Studies/' 
1895. 

"Giordano Bruno," appeared in Fortnightly Re- 
view, August; revised and reprinted as Chapter 
VII. of "Gaston de Latour/' 1896. 

Reviews "Lilly's A Century of Revolution," 
Nineteenth Century, December. 

"Appreciations/' with an "Essay on Style/' pub- 
lished by Messrs. Macmillan, containing the essays 
mentioned above with the addition of "Shake- 
speare's English Kings." 

1890 

Reviews "The Contes of M. Augustin Filon/' 
Guardian, July 16, and "Mr. Gosse's Poems/' 
Guardian, October 29; both reprinted in "Essays 
from the Guardian/' 1896. 

"Art Notes in North Italy/' appeared in New 
Review, November; reprinted in "Miscellaneous 
Studies/' 1895. 

"Prosper Merimee/' delivered as lecture at Ox- 
ford in November, appeared in Fortnightly Review, 
December; reprinted in "Miscellaneous Studies/' 
1895. 

[160] 



CHRONOLOGY 

"Appreciations/* second edition, omitting "Es- 
thetic Poetry/' and including "Feuillet's La 
Morte/' published by Messrs. Macmillan. 

1891 

Reviews "Dorian Gray/' Bookman, November. 

Begins his course of lectures on "Plato and 
Platonism." 

1892 

Contributes the "Introduction to the Purgatory 
of Dante Alighieri/' by C. L. Shadwell. 

"The Genius of Plato/' appeared in Contempo- 
rary Review, February; reprinted as Chapter VI. of 
"Plato and Platonism/' 1893. 

"A Chapter on Plato/' appeared in Macmillan's 
Magazine, May; reprinted as Chapter I. of "Plato 
and Platonism/' 1893. 

"Lacedaemon/' appeared in Contemporary Re- 
view, June; reprinted as Chapter VIII. of "Plato 
and Platonism/' 1893. 

"Emerald Uthwart/' appeared in New Review, 
June and July; reprinted in "Miscellaneous 
Studies/' 1895. 

"Raphael/' delivered as a lecture at Oxford, 
August; appeared in Fortnightly Review, October; 
reprinted in "Miscellaneous Studies/' 1895. 
[161] 



WALTER PATER 

1893 

Pater removes his household to Oxford. 

Contributes "Mr. George Moore as an Art 
Critic" to Daily Chronicle, June 10. 

"Apollo in Picardy," appeared in Harper's Mag- 
azine, November; reprinted in "Miscellaneous 
Studies/' 1895. 

"Plato and Platonism," published by Messrs. 
Macmillan. 

1894 

"The Age of Athletic Prizemen/' appeared in 
Contemporary Review, February; reprinted in 
"Greek Studies/' 1895. 

"Some Great Churches in France, (1) Notre 
Dame d'Amiens, (2) Vezelay/' appeared in Nine- 
teenth Century, March and June; reprinted in 
"Miscellaneous Studies/' 1895. 

"Pascal/' written for delivery as a lecture at 
Oxford in July, appeared in the Contemporary Re- 
view, December; reprinted in "Miscellaneous 
Studies/' 1895. 

Walter Pater died, July 30. 

1895 
"Miscellaneous Studies " and "Greek Studies/' 
containing the essays mentioned above, are pre- 
[162] 



CHRONOLOGY 

pared for the press by Mr. C. L. Shadwell, and 
published by Messrs. Macmillan. 

1896 
"Essays from the Guardian/' published privately 
at the Chiswick Press. "Gaston de Latour, an Un- 
finished Romance," with contents as above, slightly 
augmented from manuscript, prepared for the 
press by Mr. C. L. Shadwell, and published by 
Messrs. Macmillan 



THE END 



[163] 



CONTEMPORARY MEN OF LETTERS SERIES 
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY, EDITOR 



THE purpose of this series is to provide brief but compre- 
hensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers 
and of those who, though dead, may still properly be re- 
garded as belonging to our time. There is a legitimate 
interest in the lives of our contemporaries that is quite dis- 
tinct from mere personal curiosity. There is also, in spite 
of the obvious limitations of contemporary criticism, a 
justifiable ambition to arrive at some final estimate of the 
literary production of our age in advance of posterity. It 
is to satisfy so far as possible this ambition and this interest 
that the present series is planned. European as well as 
English and American men of letters are included, so as to 
give a complete survey of the intellectual and artistic life of 
an age that is characteristically cosmopolitan. It is also 
often called a decadent age, and it has therefore a varied 
outlook on life. The diverse and often conflicting points of 
view that we thus meet with in modern poets and prose 
writers are all treated intelligently and sympathetically by 
writers especially qualified in every instance, although the 
prevailing temper of the series is idealistic. 



McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO., 
141 East Twenty-fifth Street, New York. 



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